Chaos Prevailing on Every Continent: Towards a New Theory of Decentralized Decision-Making in Complex Systems

ion. We have chosen to begin by posing a relatively simple problem-solving problem that we call the "Gardener's Dilemma": How can one find a "good," or perhaps even the "best," configuration of a complex system (in this case, a garden), a collection of individual elements (plants) whose behavior (however measured) is dependent upon the behavior of many others within the system?6 This problem is a close analogue of many problems in law and social policy, which often call for a comparison of alternate future configurations of complex social systems and a choice among them.7 The question "How do we solve problems like the Gardener's Dilemma?" is therefore of some general interest-as is the well-known observation that many problems of this sort are computationally intractable, incapable of true solution by any known methods. 8 Legal theory would, we believe, be enriched by more focused consideration of this conundrum, by paying additional attention to the study of various algorithms derived from the study of "complex adaptive systems" that can successfully operate on problems of this kind. We describe one such algorithm-what Stuart Kauffman calls "patching," the division of a system into non-overlapping but coupled self-optimizing partsthat can, in certain circumstances, efficiently identify better configurations of complex systems (even if they can never be guaranteed to reach the optimal result).9 This patching algorithm bears a striking resemblance to well-known models of "competitive federalism," and we describe some experimental results that suggest that one feature of patched systems-the "congruence" between inter-individual spillover effects and the boundaries of these decisionto the state, when considered vis-A-vis their own members, but consider the development, population and demarcation of space to be irrelevant.... Legal boundaries are often ignored because they are imagined to be either the product of aggregated individual choices or the administratively necessary segmentation of centralized governmental power.... ... [W]e have not one, but two tacit conceptions of space-space as opaque and space as transparent. On the one hand, we often implicitly see political space as natural and fixed. On the other hand, and often at the same time, we see political space as irrelevant. Richard Thompson Ford, The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis, 107 HARV. L. REV. 1841, 1857-59 (1994). 6. See infra section I.A. 7. See infra section I.B. 8. See infra section I.C. 9. See infra Part II. 1998] CHICAGO-KENT LAW REVIEW making patches-is a critical determinant of the effectiveness of patching as a problem-solving device. 10 We conclude with some speculation as to the implications of these findings for the problem of Internet "governance," and for existing models of federalism and related governance structures. I. THE ANALYSIS OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS A. The Gardener's Dilemma Imagine a garden consisting of many different plants of many different species and a gardener who seeks to maximize some variable over the garden as a whole-total yield, for example. The gardener faces a particular decision: whether, with respect to each individual plant, to prune it back or leave it unpruned. How can our gardener find the "best" combination of pruned and unpruned plants, the configuration that will produce the most luxuriant growth overall? The garden, we assume, has the following general characteristics. First, individuals are heterogeneous; the relationship between an individual's state (pruned or unpruned) and its growth is different for each plant; for some plants, pruning will increase growth (by reducing the diversion of scarce nutrients, water, sunlight, etc., into unnecessary foliage), while for others the "shock" of pruning will cause them to grow less vigorously. This heterogeneity may be due to differences among species -asparagus plants may react differently to pruning, on average, than tomatoes-and to differences between individuals of the same species (because of differences in overall health or vigor or genetic constitution, for example). Second, there are substantial spillover effects between and among the individual plants, by which we mean that each individual's growth can be affected-positively or negatively-by the condition and growth of other plants.1 The condition of an individual's neighbors