An early step toward understanding any set of phenomena is to learn what kinds of things there are in the set - to develop a taxonomy. The success of planning on such a scale may call for modesty and restraint in setting the design objectives and drastic simplification of the real-world situation in representing it for purposes of the design process. Human cognition architecture Human memory is best regarded as an extension of the environment in which human thought processes take place and not as an increment in the complexity of these processes. What is remarkable about the whole architecture is that memory enables the system to operate efficiently in a wide array of different task domains using the same basic equipment that it employs to understand and solve Tea Ceremony problems or simple statics problems in physics. Complexity as hierarchy complexity frequently takes the form of hierarchy and that hierarchic systems have some common properties independent of their specific content.
Hierarchy is one of the central structural schemes that the architect of complexity uses.
The time required for the evolution of a complex form from simple elements depends critically on the numbers and distribution of potential intermediate stable forms. Near decomposability hierarchies have the property of near decomposability. Intracomponent linkages are generally stronger than intercomponent linkages. August 3 1999.