Systems design explains the world (2020)

Artistry is hard and artistry is basically the same thing as design but harder.

Let's take something like say painting. Painting requires a lot of skill. Why? Two reasons. The sheer amount of ways to compose paint into a painting is astronomical. Much much much More then the amount of atoms in the universe. The amount of these paintings that would be considered "art" is also astronomical in number but the ratio of art to all possible paintings is minuscule in number and can basically be rounded to zero. This ratio and the actual huge numbers plugged into the ratio illustrate how hard artistry is.

How about building art or designs with legos? Suddenly it's easier. Why? Because the number of ways legos can be composed in a limited space is much smaller then the ways you can compose paint on a canvas. This is because lego Blocks have specific rules. Two lego blocks have a countable number of ways they can be composed, two brush strokes can be positioned with enough variation that composition is more or less infinite. This is why designing something in legos is EASIER than painting. In fact this is the part where the word "artistry" starts to transition to "design". In legos it can be said you are "designing" a structure. Basically when the skill involved with the creative endeavor becomes significantly easier we tend to transition from artistry to the word "design". It's not a hard rule but definitely a generality that exists.

I look at these constructs made by a "lego artist" and I know I can ALSO make those big constructs if I had the will and time to do it. It's a feat of enduring tedium and not much skill. But the mona lisa in oil paints? you need skill to render that.

Do you see where I'm going here? What's system design if not putting together lego like primitives? It's trivial. The only thing you need here is knowledge about how the primitives work and how they compose. That's really the only challenge.

Heck you can even write a program that has all possible "boxes" as primitives with the right composition rules and just brute force evolve a design through random compositions. Each design has what? at most 40 primitives in a typical design? Maybe 200 total primitives? Let's make it 10,000 total system design primitives just to be excessively generous. Even at that number, system design is easy enough that it's a candidate for genetic programming.

Do you think such a thing can be accomplished with pixels? Randomly generate a square of 1000x1000 color pixels until you get something that looks legit? Running it at 5000 generations per second you probably won't get anything legit before the sun goes super nova. You'll need to switch out of random walk to machine learning to get anything artistic.

I never made the claim the system was complete.

>If you read cybernetics texts today, they paint a picture very similar to neural networks and the statistical methods for processing data. "Introduction to Cybernetics" by W. Ross Ashby is a decent text with a lot of good exercises. I still think there's a lot to learn here.

well unfortunately I don't see anything formal in the Wikipedia. I'll take a deeper look at that text though.