Complexity

I'm not a math guy. I'm familiar with a couple of concepts, though, and one of them is complexity, which is the idea that complex systems and phenomena can be deconstructed into a zillion simple actions. (I'm pretty sure 'zillion' isn't a math term.)

I was thinking about this idea this morning when I came across a Fast Company article about a company called DayJet, which intends to build an on-demand air taxi service. The magic is what lurks behind that 'on demand'. They promise that their web site will tell you, within about five seconds, what they'll charge you to bring you from Point A to Point B. That charge varies by location, number of seats, and time of day, and what drives that ability is a series of simulations done over years that show what the best fit is between the capabilities of the company (how many planes, how many passengers, where to where) and the buying public. In a sense, they're like the NetJet idea, in that you're buying the services of an aircraft only as you need it, but its more fractional and demand driven.

The article was agog over the use of complexity science to deconstruct the range of possibilities -- locations, planes, passengers, fares -- to come up with what the company calls a 'fitness landscape'. Perhaps they were right to be so; to me, its pretty obvious stuff, even though I could not do it myself. Its an old managerial theorem: anything you don't have to personally do is pretty simple, coupled with the Heinlein quote: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I liked it. And now I'm going to go read a little about complexity, and see how many pages I can go through before my brain melts down.