Will a Large Complex System Be Stable?¶
MAY, R. M. (1972). Will a Large Complex System Be Stable?. Nature, 238(5364), 413-414.
Cited by¶
2 citations across 2 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Group Cohesion
- It also bounds prediction in the other direction: a system can be too cohesive, so tightly coupled that a local failure propagates through every link at once — a complexity the single variable flags as readily as it flags the fragile, under-bound case.
This sourceFoundational result that randomly assembled systems are stable up to a critical level of connectance and then abruptly destabilize; grounds the claim that excessive cohesion couples a unit so tightly that local shocks propagate everywhere (the over-coupling fragility pattern transferred from ecology to organizations).
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
May's abstract states only that randomly connected complex systems stay stable up to a critical connectance and then turn suddenly unstable — the 'too cohesive' half of the claim, not the propagation mechanism.
“Gardner and Ashby 1 have suggested that large complex systems which are assembled (connected) at random may be expected to be stable up to a certain critical level of connectance, and then, as this increases, to suddenly become unstable.”
- It also bounds prediction in the other direction: a system can be too cohesive, so tightly coupled that a local failure propagates through every link at once — a complexity the single variable flags as readily as it flags the fragile, under-bound case.
Domain-specific¶
Verification¶
Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 2 citations: 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
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Registry ID ref:624e4e786998 · see in the full table