Eric Lawton reviewed Signals and boundaries by Holland, John H.
Review of 'Signals and boundaries' on 'Storygraph'
1 star
I was very disappointed by this book - I'd read the free sample on Kindle and it looked very interesting. Luckily, I got it from a library as I would really have hated to pay full price.
The premise is that you can model many aspects of complex adaptive systems (CAS's) using the mathematical formalism of Dynamic Generated Systems (dgs's (Holland's non-capitalization)).
He asserts that dgs's can model ecosystems, organisms, biological cells, economies, governments and more. Dgs's model the idea of an agent with a boundary that processes input signals and generates output signals.
He slowly builds up a more complex model but never provides enough detail, cherry-picks from hundreds of different examples while never providing a single convincing worked example.
He flips between levels (organism/species) too readily. For example, although he states that a species is an agent, a species does not have the same behaviour as an organism …
I was very disappointed by this book - I'd read the free sample on Kindle and it looked very interesting. Luckily, I got it from a library as I would really have hated to pay full price.
The premise is that you can model many aspects of complex adaptive systems (CAS's) using the mathematical formalism of Dynamic Generated Systems (dgs's (Holland's non-capitalization)).
He asserts that dgs's can model ecosystems, organisms, biological cells, economies, governments and more. Dgs's model the idea of an agent with a boundary that processes input signals and generates output signals.
He slowly builds up a more complex model but never provides enough detail, cherry-picks from hundreds of different examples while never providing a single convincing worked example.
He flips between levels (organism/species) too readily. For example, although he states that a species is an agent, a species does not have the same behaviour as an organism and does not even have a clear boundary.
He doesn't provide any worked examples of how his formalisms can model anything complex in the real world. His worked examples are of trivial problems; fair enough, but his claims at the end that they can be extended to the real examples that he cites fail to be convincing. It is all argument by weak analogy.
Since his models are simulations of CAS's, and there is no worked example to compare with a real world model, there is no way to know if they could be useful.