The Sciences of the Artificial¶
Simon, H. A. (1969/1996). The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press.
Cited by¶
4 citations across 4 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Decomposition
- This distinction sharpens thinking about what can be safely decomposed and what cannot, a question Simon (1969) framed through his concept of near-decomposability as a testable empirical property of complex systems.
This sourceDevelops near-decomposability as a general structural strategy for the design of artificial systems and a testable property of complex systems.
- This distinction sharpens thinking about what can be safely decomposed and what cannot, a question Simon (1969) framed through his concept of near-decomposability as a testable empirical property of complex systems.
- Hierarchy
- This foundational insight
This sourceDevelops the distinction between flat modular composition and hierarchical containment; situates near-decomposability as a general structural strategy for the design of artificial systems.
- This foundational insight
- Refinement
- Many real-world problems do not require global optima: an engineer accepts a mesh that converges to within 1% error rather than waiting for 0.01% error; a writer accepts a draft that is "good enough for publication" rather than infinitely polishing, the satisficing posture Simon (1996) argues is the actual practice of design under bounded resources.
This sourceDevelops the doctrine of near-decomposability for complex artifacts: real systems exhibit weak but nonzero couplings between subsystems, so perfect compositional independence is unattainable in practice and the engineering goal is to minimize and make explicit the residual cross-module dependencies.
- Many real-world problems do not require global optima: an engineer accepts a mesh that converges to within 1% error rather than waiting for 0.01% error; a writer accepts a draft that is "good enough for publication" rather than infinitely polishing, the satisficing posture Simon (1996) argues is the actual practice of design under bounded resources.
- Variation Strategies
- Effective variation strategies couple injection of alternatives with rapid, systematic evaluation of outcomes—the variation must be controlled and assessed, the coupling Simon (1996) identifies as essential for any system to convert variation into adaptive search rather than dissipative noise.
This sourceDevelops the doctrine of near-decomposability for complex artifacts: real systems exhibit weak but nonzero couplings between subsystems, so perfect compositional independence is unattainable in practice and the engineering goal is to minimize and make explicit the residual cross-module dependencies.
- Effective variation strategies couple injection of alternatives with rapid, systematic evaluation of outcomes—the variation must be controlled and assessed, the coupling Simon (1996) identifies as essential for any system to convert variation into adaptive search rather than dissipative noise.
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