From Hairballs, Tangles, and Futility to Technological Progress

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In this talk, I will provide a set of metaphors and potential approaches to solving hard-to-define and hard-to-conceptualize problems. These are problem domains for which unknown and unknowable factors predominate. We will focus on two types of system that characterize the reciprocal causality and interactions inherent in sociotechnological complexity: hairballs and futile cycles. Borrowing from network science and metabolic engineering, respectively, we will explore how these types of system characterization provide a means to understand interactivity, redundancy, and robustness as something that can be incorporated into an open source workflow. To conclude, this talk will also take a 10-year retrospective on the Hard-to-Define Events workshop, held at Artificial Life 13 (http://syntheticdaisies.blogspot.com/p/htde-workshop-2012.html). This will point us in the direction of future work in this area, which goes beyond software development to applied scientific discovery.