Thanks for pointing out the early reference to Buckminster's Fuller work
with order and randomness. I fear that I have not made the distinction
below sufficiently clear, eh.
(( The formula You give for the number of pair-wise relationships in a
collection of N things is certainly an aspect of complexity which should
become more common knowledge... programmers encounter it early because it
is a phenomenon which makes their programs run a lot slower, some people
looking for consensus encounter it when their number increases and the
work resolving all of the relationships seems suddenly a lot harder. The
formula addresses the number of possible direct connections between all
members of the collection. ))
What I was addressing is the complexity related to indirect connections.
When these connections are transitive.... i.e. if I influence John, and
John influences You, then I influence You. When looking at such indirect
connections in a whole system, the result on complexity which I refer to
is very surprising... because it indicates that if on average, each member
has just under 2 direct connections with the others (PI over 2, in fact),
that the number of indirect connections suddenly jumps relatively few, to
almost N(N-1)/2 (the formula You quote).
In our work, we have treated this phenomenon as Emergence itself... once
sufficient, and relatively few direct connections are made, a Whole (the
net which is strongly connected) emerges from what was dis-order.
It is also surprising that PI works its pervasive way into all of this,
eh?
----------------------
Dr. Doug Seeley: compuserve 100433,133... Fax: +41 22 756 3759
InterDynamics Pty. Ltd. (Australia) in Geneva, Switzerland
"Integrity is not merely an ideal; it is the only reality."