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.

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A search without pre-instated rules.

This is supposed to be the way mutations and natural selection do operate.

H. PATTEE observes however: "The first criticism is that random search cannot be expected to 'find' successful organization because the search space is so immense. Thus a search for just one sequence of 100 amino acids representing one functional enzyme would require of the order of 20 trials which is not within any reasonable probability within the age or size of the universe" (1972, p.38)

H. SIMON proposed his Hora and Tempus metaphor about progress towards evolutive complexity by hierarchization as a possible reply to this riddle (1965).

H. PATTEE pursues: "The second criticism is that functional optima or fitness peaks in the adaptive landscape appear to be local, separate optima, so that no evolutionary pathway can be imagined that does not pass through nonfunctional or lethal valleys. Random search and selection can provide a mechanism for adaptation with respect to one of these optima, but for any fitness landscape with a realistic number of dimensions, the trapping problem becomes unsolvable" (Ibid).

His conclusion is that we need a mechanism of self-simplification to escape from this impossibility. Notably, he considers, like SIMON, that self-simplification must be based on hierarchy.

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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