The Architecture of Complexity

By Herbert A. Simon. 1991

Subfields: Social Sciences & Humanities, Network Science & Complex Systems

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In Social Sciences & Humanities

In Network Science & Complex Systems

Citations in the corpus

Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback (2023, background): “Iterative self -refinement is a fundamental characteristic of human problem-solving (Simon, 1962; Flower and Hayes, 1981; Amabile, 1983).”
Recurrent Independent Mechanisms (2019, background): “Models learned this way may be more likely to capture the compositional generative (or causal) structure of the world, and thus better generalize across tasks where a (small) subset of mechanisms change while most of them remain invariant (Simon, 1991; Peters et al., 2017; Parascandolo et al., 2018)”
Community detection in graphs (2009, background): “At some point, a conflict between the club president and the instructor led to the fission of the club in two separate groups, supporting the instructor and the president, respectively (indicated by squares and circles).”
Neuroaesthetics: A Coming of Age Story (2011, background): “The general point is that visual neuroaesthetics, likemost complex biological systems, is hierarchical and can be decomposed into stable component subsystems (Simon, 1962).”
Random walks and diffusion on networks (2016, background): “Hierarchical modularity A hierarchical network can indicate the presence of “hierarchical modularity”, in which dense modules are themselves composed of dense submodules in the recursive manner of a “Russian doll” [174].”
Beyond Gaussian averages: redirecting international business and management research toward extreme events and power laws (2007, background): “Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon (1962) argued the case for 'nearly decomposable' subunits – the basis of what is now called 'modular design' (Baldwin and Clark, 2000).”
Finding Statistically Significant Communities in Networks (2010, unknown): “Simon pointed out that hierarchy gives robustness and stability to complex systems, yielding an evolutionary advantage on the long run [26].”
Limits to Modularity: Reflections on Recent Developments in Chip Design (2005, methodology): “Engineers can now use the twin tools of analysis and synthesis to reduce significantly the complexity of the technology interfaces (Simon, 1962; Henderson and Clark, 1990; von Hippel, 1990; Kogut and Zander, 1993).”
From simplistic to complex systems in economics (2005, background): “This involves an emphasis upon gaining an understanding of the structural, or architectural (Simon (1962)), characteristics of economic systems, and how these can be represented analytically, rather than exploring the dynamic paths that quantitative representations of evolutionary economic…”
Communities in Networks (2009, background): “ne can clarify some issues through the notions of modules and hierarchies. In general, a network’s community structure encompasses a potentially complicated set of hierarchical and modular components [39,48,117]. In this context, the term module is typically used to refer to a single cluster of node”
Modularity and Innovation in Complex Systems (2002, unknown): “6 Central to the notion of modularity is the distinction between interactions within sub-systems and interactions between sub-systems of complex systems (Simon 1962).”
Microfoundations of Routines and Capabilities: Individuals, Processes, and Structure (2012, background): “Classic works in organization theory also may provide additional insights into each category of micro-origins (such as, March and Simon, 1958; Cohen, March and Olsen, 1972; Thompson, 2003; Cyert and March, 1963; Simon, 1947, 1991).”
The problem of pattern and scale in ecology: what have we learned in 20 years? (2013, background): “Biological systems are inherently hierarchically structured and modular (Simon 1962; Hartwell et al. 1999).”
Deictic Codes for the Embodiment of CognitionDana (1995, background): “If the block is at the top of the stack the next operation should be PickUp, butif it is on the table, the next instruction should be Fixate(Green).”
On dimensionless numbers (2008, unknown): “Multiscale science and hierarchy): Bergmann, 1944, Furusawa and Kaneko, 1998, Garnett, 1942, Glimm and Sharp, 1997, Henle, 1942, Hoover and Hoover, 2003, Li and Ge, 2007, Li and Kwauk, 2004, Koplik and Banavar, 1995, Lowry, 1974, Marin, 2005, Pattee, 1973, Sewell, 2002, Simon, 1965.”
Energy Models for Graph Clustering (2007, unknown): “Researchers from Herbert Simon [47] to Mark Newman [39] have observed that many real-world systems share a common structure: They are decomposable into subsystems with strong intra-subsystem interactions and relatively weak inter-subsystem interactions.”