Tutorial 1 - Gall's Basic Systems Axioms (Hoang Tuan Long)

16. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work; you have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

Answer(Hoang Tuan Long)

Building a big complicated system from scratch and expecting it to work flawlessly is like an impossible misson, which forces you to start from a working simple system first. It’s like you cannot make a good working car if you have not owned a working start engine which is a smaller and simpler component of any car first. Maybe the start engine doesn’t work but you have to try to fix it into working mode in order to move on to work on other smaller and simpler components which are essential to a working car and one more time you work hard and carefully to make them perfect, make them work. That’s the shortest path of success, otherwise  you end up having no working car at all.

Let us take a look at  an IT example. Let’s say the most popular search engine over the world – Google. Google search engine has evolved over the years with many extra features added for searching optimization. When first started, Google used the algorithm called “PageRank”  to rank websites in their search engine results and also used many other different options for customized search such as exclusion, alternatives and wildcards, all of which use Boolean operators. They worked well with each other. However, it is the story of the last decade; search demands of today are shown to be a lot more challenging.  Regardless of how challenging as it is, Google already had a good working system to base on, they only needed to extend from there. In 2013, they put a new search algorithm called Hummingbird to use. One of Google people said: “The old search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s” from the query  “What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want an actual store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words”.