2017-10-15 Sunday - Self-Organized Criticality - and Cycles of Corrective Collapse

In my reading this weekend - I happened upon the concept of "Self-Organized Criticality" - and that led me to consider the possible implications for evolutionary constraints on the design of some complex software systems.  The idea of "ongoing cycle of corrective collapse" resonates well with my casual observations of software needing to be refactored / rewritten - to simply make it maintainable and testable.

The point here is that organizations, generally, do not plan for such rework - they wait until the "corrective collapse".

"In 1987 a Danish physicist named Per Bak released a landmark paper introducing the concept of self-organized criticality. Bak observed that complex systems draw stability through an ongoing cycle of corrective collapses that keep the overall system from becoming too over-extended."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality



I've created this posting as a reminder to come back and revisit this idea in the future - I would like to explore it further in some white papers, when I have more time to write.