[HN Gopher] Reminder of Complexity ___________________________________________________________________ Reminder of Complexity Author : azhenley Score : 97 points Date : 2020-06-07 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.johndcook.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.johndcook.com) | cxr wrote: | Half-related: Reality has a surprising amount of detail | | http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-... | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 | 0d9eooo wrote: | Related: | | https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1362 | | At some point the complexity of a system becomes great enough | that it's impossible to simulate it perfectly. | | The interesting question for me lately is how and under what | circumstances can you ignore the complexity for some purpose. | | For example, underlying what is represented in that poster is | some set of physical processes that are ignored in that poster. | The system at that physical level of description would be even | more complex, probably too complex to represent on a poster. So | why the level of analysis of the poster? Similarlly, at some | point it's easier to talk about eating and fatigue than it is the | citric acid cycle. How and why do you move from one level of | analysis to another? Some of it probably depends on what is being | explained, but some of it might not. | WJW wrote: | I love that it comes with a piece of paper reminding the viewer | that this is a __small __selection of reality. Biochemistry is | much, MUCH more complex than even these two 26 square foot | posters. | | I'd love to get a similar poster of the entire Linux kernel or, | alternatively, the total supply chain for an everyday item like | the proverbial pencil. | rantwasp wrote: | the complexity of the linux kernel (and in man-made things in | general) is usually really small compared to biological | systems. | WJW wrote: | I'm sure you could still fill a good-size poster if you make | a nice inefficient representation, like every function call | is a separate node in the graph and you include every single | device driver even for decades old stuff like tape drives. I | agree though, Mother Nature has an inordinate love for making | everything a global variable and She definitely hates | comments. | rantwasp wrote: | the analogy is good but i think it kinda breaks down when | you consider the machine the kernel runs on. | | so you would mostly represent the machine the software run | on. | azhenley wrote: | I'd buy a similar poster of the Linux kernel. | | I'm sure some astute HN reader could whip up a script that | generates illustrative posters of static call graphs given a | Git repo! | cmrx64 wrote: | https://makelinux.github.io/kernel/map/ | | my uni had some different, older posters about linux. one was | radial with most non driver files represented. can't seem to | find them on the web though | cmrx64 wrote: | http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details.cfm?id=2 | 6... exists, not what the poster was, but WHOA way cooler. | also, old. | rantwasp wrote: | i independently ran across this when going through: | https://www.edx.org/course/principles-of-biochemistry | | As someone who is formally trained in computer science I was | literally blown away by biochemistry. Once you see that any | organism that involved organic chemistry is in fact an insanely | complicated, biological computer you cannot unsee it. It's | amazing. | | In case someone is wondering what the author of the blog post | zoomed in, that's the Krebs cycle - ie how we derive energy (ie | ATP) from the food we eat | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle). See: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juM2ROSLWfw and | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J4LXs-oDCU | nafey wrote: | This reminds me of Tesler's law says something quite useful about | how complexity works: | | "Every application has an inherent amount of complexity that | cannot be removed or hidden. Instead, it must be dealt with, | either in product development or in user interaction." ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-06-07 23:00 UTC)