Luckily, much of the world is local & hierarchical
nDepartments
in a university
nGeographical
proximity
Interactions between objects are often limited
The fact that many complex systems have
a nearly decomposable, hierarchic
structure
is a major facilitating factor
enabling us to
understand, describe, and even
“see”
such systems and their parts.
Herbert
Simon
Why do we think that this is
a useful property?Because the world
does exhibit a large amount of locality, and is often hierarchically
structured.This, in fact, was one of
the key points in Herbert Simon’s seminal essay “On the Architecture of
Complexity”.In fact, Simon continued
to argue in that essay that, to the extent that the world is not organized in
this way, we simply cannot make sense of it, so that this assumption is the
only way by which we can deal with the real world.