Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001)

This is my first exposure to "systems thinking" from a member of the generation which kicked that term off, along with its sister term "cybernetics". The book reads not so much as a thesis, but as a way of thinking applied to a variety of closely related systems. He uses his new theory of the artificial to exploring his research on the internal environment of the human brain, and how it makes decisions, as well as the economy, and government.

The book includes a window into the research going on in Simon's cohort in the 1960s, from computational brain models such as SOAR, to chess playing bots, to highway planners, to theses on management decision-making. Simon draws on these papers to find the underlying constants that tie the common attributes of the systems together, such as the structure as hierarchical or almost-hierarchical. This is a mix of obvious and misleading. I would say that taking such a fundamental view on systems will give us profound ideas only if we can see them, it will show us obvious ideas which were non-obvious at the time, and will show us gaps in our thought that might be good candidates for exploration. One of these is a learning system which can search a tree of concepts MCTS style but applies an idea learned on one leaf immediately to other leaves which might contain similar ideas. Basically, an MCTS which tries to learn and apply patterns.

I'm really happy I discovered this, because it launched my exploration of design as a field.… (mehr)