Taming Complexity

1. Taming Complexity Leonard Kleinrock Professor, Computer Science, UCLA TTI/Vanguard

2. What is Complexity? • Really hard to define • It involves anything complex and having many interacting parts. • The emergence of order within a seemingly unordered system. • The emergence of chaotic behavior from a seemingly deterministic system.

3. Observations • Complexity is all around us • It is growing every year • It creates fear, confusion and surprise • It makes us vulnerable to: • unforeseen behavior • collapse • failures • attacks • We must learn to understand it • We must learn to live with and exploit it • We must learn to control &manage it • Yet the act of managing/fixing it can exacerbate the problem The Century of Complexity Stephen Hawking (Jan 23, 2000)

4. Number of interacting parts Vast Small Heterogeneous Type Of Parts Homogeneous Where Does it Appear? Good Luck ! Complex Simple Complex

5. Understanding Complexity • We thought that man-made systems could be understood and analyzed • We thought that natural systems, that we did not build, would be far more difficult to understand • That is no longer the case. We can no longer understand and predict the behavior of our man-made systems. • Our arrogant view no longer holds.

6. “The Challenge of Complexity” TTI/Vanguard: September 2004, Los Angeles Danny Hillis • We are reaching a serious limitation in our ability to build and construct more complex systems with higher functionality.

7. The Challenge of Complexity Alan Ganek • Our computer systems today are doing whatever someone told them to do last, rather than allowing the systems to handle things.

8. The Challenge of Complexity Gail Kaiser • It is possible to add autonomic capabilities to systems without changing the innards of those systems.

9. The Challenge of Complexity Charles Simonyi • Software is the bottleneck on the digital horn of plenty.

10. The Challenge of Complexity Paul Cohen • If you chunk things up, you get to manage their complexity very easily.

11. The Challenge of Complexity Eric Bonabeau • Evolutionarily speaking, technology has overtaken biology.

12. The Challenge of Complexity Richard Murray • Feedback allows high performance in the presence of uncertainty.

13. The Challenge of Complexity Steve Burbeck • When individual biological or computational cells combine to form interacting and interdependent structures, complex systems result; and with this complexity comes emergent behavior.

14. The Challenge of Complexity Joseph Tainter • One of the ironies of complexity is that complexity actually simplifies.

15. So What’s New? • The focus in 2004 was on the technical aspects • And now in 2011, we will address some of the advances in this arena, especially the really large technical issues of complexity, universal laws, architecture, infrastructure, sustainability, networks, uncertainty, cascading events, etc • But at this 2011 meeting, we further recognize that the human and societal elementsare more paramount than the purely technical.

16. So What’s New? • So we will further concentrate on some really big complexity issues along with some proposals to tame it • policy making in a connected world • big data scaling issues • energy • global nervous system • shared data • software • intellectual property • global food • cybersecurity • information cascades in social media • “wicked” problems

17. The Theme of This Conference • Taming complexity is all about managing the big issues and the interaction between parts systems technology organizations and society.

18. thank you t han kyo u

19. Types and Degrees of Complexity • Complicated • Hard • Random • Complex • Wicked

20. Complicated – The Standard Model for Particle Physics

21. Mathematically “hard” NP-complete: Computation cannot scale in Polynomial time with size (i.e., is exponential) Example: Traveling salesman problem

22. Problems with Random Variables • Kinetic theory of gases • Communication theory

23. Complex Systems • The number of parts (and types of parts) in the system and the number of relations between the parts is non-trivial – however, there is no general rule to separate "trivial" from "non-trivial" • The system has memory or includes feedback • The system can adapt itself according to its history or feedback • The relations between the system and its environment are non-trivial or non-linear • The system can be influenced by, or can adapt itself to, its environment • The system is highly sensitive to initial conditions

24. Measures of Complexity • Amount of resources required for the execution of algorithms • The shortest binary program that outputs the string • The total number of properties transmitted by an object and detected by an observer • In business, the variances and their consequences • The probability of a state vector of the system • In software , the interactions of various elements of the code

25. Wicked Problems • The solution depends on how the problem is framed and vice-versa (i.e. the problem definition depends on the solution) • Stakeholders have radically different world views and different frames for understanding the problem. • The constraints that the problem is subject to and the resources needed to solve it change over time. • The problem is never solved definitively.

26. Wicked Problems • Global Economics • Global Warming • Border Security • Airline Security • Afghanistan

27. “When we understand this slide, we will win the war.”Gen McChrystal

28. Solving a Wicked Problem? The usual suspect -- partitioning