LEARNINGADVANCED
Rugged Landscapes (NK)
Interacting parts create many local peaks; hill-climbers get stuck, diverse searchers find higher ground.
How it works
- Each design is a point; its payoff is the height of the landscape.
- When parts interact, the landscape wrinkles into many local peaks.
- Local search stops at the nearest peak; diversity and big jumps escape it.
Use → Product design, strategy, R&D portfolios. Add jumps and diverse heuristics when stuck.
Watch out → Declaring the optimum found because small tweaks stopped helping.
Try it → Have two teams attack one problem from different starting heuristics; compare the peaks they reach.
REDCAPE jobs → Explore · Design
Free sources → SFI Intro to Complexity • Wikipedia: NK model (CC BY-SA)
Attach to a lattice — combines with
Different families, shared jobs. Disagreement between them is where insight lives.
DIFFUSION
Bass Diffusion (S-Curve)
Innovators plus imitators make the S-curve. Spend early on seeds, later on social proof.
SHARED JOB: DESIGN
DYNAMICSCellular Automata & Game of Life
Tiny local rules aggregate into gliders, blinkers and chaos. Emergence needs no boss.
SHARED JOB: EXPLORE
GAMESCollective Action & Commons (Ostrom)
Shared pools survive with boundaries, monitors and graduated sanctions — no panacea.
SHARED JOB: DESIGN
More in Learning
Replicator Dynamics (Fisher)
Winning strategies reproduce faster; adaptation speed rises with variation.
Multi-Armed Bandit
Balance pulling the best-known lever against testing new ones. Regret is the score.
Diversity Prediction Theorem
Crowd error equals average error minus diversity. Diverse models beat the lone genius.