25 March 2009

Self Repair

Some random musings about how things go together. Why not? It's a blog ..

Systems that repair themselves are interesting. Living creatures self-repair. Things like bee-hives and termite mounds self-repair, in a sense. Even businesses and governments self-repair. What these things have in common is that a larger scale structure is maintained by the actions of its constituents. As long as a certain degree of organization is maintained, the collective entity can restore itself to some normal state of being. Your body can tolerate the loss of a few skin cells; a termite colony can survive an attack from an ant-eater; your company could replace a few people if it had to.

Structure: Suppose you have a set of elements that are the components of the system, and that the elements interact in various ways with one another and with the environment so as to ensure the continued existence of the system. It seems fairly obvious that the cells that make up, say, your dog have to keep some spatial relationship, or else you don't really have a dog. So structure is necessary, but not necessarily spatial structure; consider the business model. The structuring isn't in whose office is next to whose, it's in the inter-relationships of the defined roles of the workers, i.e., who interacts with who. This is structure like (I think) mathematicians think of structure: a set of parts and the relationships between those parts.

Energy: Of course it takes some energy to make things interesting. A brick wall has parts (bricks, mortar, a foundation, etc.), and relationships (bricks spatially situated relative to other bricks, mortar interposed, and so on), but it isn't really that interesting because it doesn't really do anything. One thing it certainly doesn't do is repair itself. That's where the energy comes in. Self-repair requires some means for the parts of the system to interact with the environment to use the energy that's available there to move old, damaged parts out of the system, to manipulate raw materials into replacement parts, and to get those new parts into place.

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