Understandability and predictability

이해와 예측가능성:

For our everyday experience has led us to expect that an object that looks complicated must have been constructed in a complicated way. … But the results at the end of the previous section show that at least sometimes such an assumption can be completely wrong. …

So what is it that makes our normal intuition fail? The most important point seems to be that it is mostly derived from experience with building things and doing engineering - where it so happens that one avoids encountering systems like the ones in the previous section.

For normally we start from whatevery behavior we want to get, then try to design a system that will produce it. Yet to do this reliably, we have to restrict ourselves to systems whose behavior we can readily understand and predict - for unless we can foresee how a system will behave, we cannot be sure that the system will do what we want.

But unlike engineering, nature operates under no such constraint. So there is nothing to stop systems like those at the end of the previous section from showing up. And in fact one of the important conclusions of this book is that such systems are actually very common in nature. —p40, A new kind of science

Can systems that are based on numbers ever in fact yield complex behavior? … If one ignores the need for analysis and instead just looks at the results of computer experiments, then one quickly finds that even rather simple systems based on numbers can lead to highly complex behavior. —p115-116, A new kind of science