23. A complex system can fail in an infinite number of ways
Answer (Vuong Tan)
The word ‘infinite’ here does not really mean infinite, it is a exaggeration, but it still makes sense because complex systems tend to show a big number of failures in different number of ways. Complex systems includes many parts and those parts interact with each other, and these interactions can cause unexpected problems. There are only few ways for a system to properly operate and perform the few core functions it is designed for. For example, a calculator system is designed to solve the calculating problems like addition, substraction, multiplication and division and this system only has few ways to do handle those above operations because there are only few limited ways to do that in mathematics. In constrast, there are thousand ways to fail this system, some of which might be: input an alphabetic character, input nothing at all, input spaces only, input a very long paragraph...
The above calculator system is only a simple system, but it still has to face many ways of failure. Thus, the number of ways of failure becomes very huge, maybe close to infinite when it comes to complex systems.
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