BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

ADAPTATION (Obstacles to) 1)2)

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Some of the most significant obstacles to adaptation are:

- Difficulty to evaluate former performance due to:

a) incomplete data

b) poor criteria for defining positive or negative performance

c) difficulty to distinguish between different causes of poor or good performance (causal multidimensionality implying nonlinearity)

d) difficulty to distinguish between short, medium and long trends in performance (a poor performance can be a near random short-term fluctuation or a symptom of a deep seated problem)

- Difficulty to discover elements or conditions that may lead to a better performance, including difficulty to select the most useful ones

- Difficulty to distinguish and overcome negative factors that induce poor performance

- Difficulty to arbitrate trade-offs between desired but contradictory performances (speed versus capacity in a network of roads, for ex.)

- Difficulty to avoid future local optima that may become dead ends

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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