Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Imperfection: The last law of design

I do not intend to start a debate but i believe that imperfection is the key to a great system design. I believe that inherently the universe was left imperfect by creation ( ?? ). I think perfection is too dificult to achieve even by God (no debates on athiesm or creationsim intended ). So instead he decided to make everything imperfect and in that imperfection lies the beauty of making everything work the way it should.

I think the uncertainity principle, godel's theorem and probability are all a symbol of leaving away the details. Because in any system the minutest details cannot be stated to the infinite degree. So God or who knows the universe itself decided on its own that let us give no details below the planck distance. Or maybe it is too computationally tedious to describe the movement of each of a 100 billion gas atoms so just make it chaotic.

So the last rule of design is to make things imperfect because that is where the fun starts. Let us say we want to make a website, fully upgradeable and to the minutest details , we make it perfect. Well we have achieved everything !! Its perfect ! Now what ? Nothing else left to do , nothing to add or remove , because it is perfect. But is it possible ? It is not possible as we all know and should understand its impossible to percieve the future, only speculation is under the power of humans (or who knows even God). Perfection can only be restricted to a small domain. It can never be universal. But imperfection is universal and it works !! Some might say its not imperfection I talk about, it is just ignorance. Since I dont know so I say it is imperfect... I will just say it is impossible to make something perfect and so it is throughout.

What is possible is to make an imperfect system but to make it self improving (remember the matrix with the anomaly !). the anomalies sweep the imperfection, cause the chaos and ultimately benefits the system by making it change.

Well I gues the post is incomplete with me looking for more reasons to write more on this...

No comments: