TopDown vs BottomUp

Kevin Kelly has written an interesting post about the balance of bottom-up processes and top-down control. He emphasizes a balanced combination of bottom-up contributions and top-down control, and this is in fact what you need to engineer self-organizing systems.

The engineering of self-organizing systems is a contradiction in itself: how can you organize something which organizes itself? If we want to build a self-organizing system with autonomous agents, then how can we ensure the function ? Agents do by defintion what they want. How can you construct a self-organizing system? How can we engineer emergence?

The answer is: in a balanced, iterative process which combines top-down analysis with bottom-up simulation, where we step by step define the 'rules of the game'. The bottom-up process is needed ensure diversity (innovative, random, surprising elements). The top-down process ensure unity (e.g. function, quality and goal-orientation). Together they form a cyclic round-trip process, which can be named synthetic microanalysis. This is nothing else but the scientific method applied to engineering.

Links

• Kevin Kelly, The Bottom is Not Enough

• Swarm intelligence and hierarchies

• On the balance of top-down and bottom-up