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Cover Quote: January 1997

The problem with complex systems like nuclear power plants, the AIDS virus, the economy or the human genome is that we cannot do the kinds of experiments needed to create a reliable model and theory of their operation. For example, it doesn’t take too much imagination to envision the reaction of the Securities and Exchange Commission, not to mention the global financial community, if someone were to propose moving interest rates up, say, 500 basis points for a couple of weeks in order to test some new theory of currency and stock‐price fluctuations. It’s just not possible to do this kind of experiment because the operation of the system is too central to daily life to mess about with it in this way. Sometimes, as with the nuclear reactor, experiments aimed at understanding the limits beyond which a meltdown will occur also cannot be performed, simply because they’re too dangerous; the experiment could easily kill the experimenter. And so it goes with the other systems considered.

So it goes—until now. For the first time in history we are in a position to do bona fide laboratory experiments on these kinds of complex systems. No longer do we have to live in the shadow world of hypotheticality, or just break off bits and pieces of the actual system and study these fragments in isolation with the hope that we can then re-assemble these chunks of partial knowledge into an understanding of the overall system itself. But now, thanks to the availability of affordable, high-quality computing capabilities, we can actually construct silicon surrogates for these complex, real-world processes. We can use these surrogates as laboratories for carrying out the experiments needed to be able to construct viable theories of complex physical, social, biological, and behavioral processes.



- John L. Casti
Would-Be Worlds, 1997
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