Catastrophic Failure in Complex Systems
Software systems exhibit a peculiar property: the more sophisticated they become, the more they tend toward catastrophic rather than graceful failure. This pattern isn’t unique to software - it’s characteristic of all complex systems, from neural networks to financial markets. But software’s rapid evolution and ubiquity makes it a particularly interesting case study. A complex system isn’t merely complicated. Rather, it possesses specific properties that make its behavior fundamentally unpredictable:...