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Template:M intro design System redundancy: Difference between revisions
Template:M intro design System redundancy (view source)
Revision as of 20:56, 13 September 2023
, 13 September 2023→Fragility and tight coupling
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The “leaner” a distributed system is, the more ''[[fragile]]'' it will be and the more “[[single points of failure]]” it will contain whose malfunction, in the best case, will halt the whole system, and in [[tightly-coupled]] [[complex system]]s may trigger a chain reaction of successive component failures, chain reactions and unpredictable nonlinear consequences. On 9/11, as Martin Amis put it, 20 box-cutters created two million tonnes of rubble, left 4,000 dead, and transformed global politics for a generation. | The “leaner” a distributed system is, the more ''[[fragile]]'' it will be and the more “[[single points of failure]]” it will contain whose malfunction, in the best case, will halt the whole system, and in [[tightly-coupled]] [[complex system]]s may trigger a chain reaction of successive component failures, chain reactions and unpredictable nonlinear consequences. On 9/11, as Martin Amis put it, 20 box-cutters created two million tonnes of rubble, left 4,000 dead, and transformed global politics for a generation. | ||
A financial market is a [[complex system]]. It comprises an indeterminate number of autonomous actors, many of whom — notably participating corporations — are themselves complex systems, interacting in unpredictable ways. It is the nature of a complex system that it is unpredictable — not just in the sense of a jointed pendulum, whose exact path is impossible to predict, but whose possible range of movement, it's design space, is known to 100 percent. The “design space” of a complex system is unknown. You cannot calculate even probabilistically how it will behave. The fact that, for long periods, it appears to closely cleave to simple operating parameters is beside the point. | A financial market is a [[complex system]]. It comprises an indeterminate number of autonomous actors, many of whom — notably participating corporations — are themselves complex systems, interacting in unpredictable ways. It is the nature of a complex system that it is unpredictable — not just in the sense of a jointed pendulum, whose exact path is impossible to predict, but whose possible range of movement, it's design space, is known to 100 percent. The “design space” of a complex system is unknown. You cannot calculate even probabilistically how it will behave. The fact that, for long periods, it appears to closely cleave to simple operating parameters is beside the point. | ||
The robustness of any system depends on the tightness of the coupling between components. How much slack is there? In financial markets, increasingly, none at all. | The robustness of any system depends on the tightness of the coupling between components. How much slack is there? In financial markets, increasingly, none at all. | ||