If you haven’t done so already, you may want to start by reading the Preface to Knowledge Engineering & Emerging Technologies.
January 31st, 2024 (4th ed)1
When designing a system, what should you optimize? If it is a user-interface or process, you should be minimizing clicks, or process steps. But for hardware-software systems, the answer is not obvious, and a common mistake is to fail to consider the end-to-end problem. This article explores what is involved in optimizing end-to-end in hardware-software systems. The goal here is to minimize the overall complexity of the system, i.e. of the triple hardware-software-user combination. The following remarks set the stage for our discussion:
- “Any [one] can make things bigger, more complex. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.” – Ernst F. Schumacher, 1973, from “Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered”.2
- “The goal [is] simple: to minimize the complexity of the hardware-software combination. [Apart from] some lip service perhaps, no-one is trying to minimize the complexity of anything and that is of great concern to me.” – Chuck Moore, [Moore, 1999] (For a succinct introduction to Chuck Moore’s minimalism, see Less is Moore by Sam Gentle, [Gentle, 2015]
- “We are reaching the stage of development [in computer science] where each new generation of participants is unaware both of their overall technological ancestry and the history of the development of their speciality, and have no past to build upon.” – J.A.N. Lee, [Lee, 1996, p.54].
- “The arc of change is long, but it bends towards simplicity”, paraphrasing Martin Luther King.3
Between complexity and simplicity, progress, and new layers of abstraction.
Continue reading this article…
- 3rd ed. (Jul 20, 2021), 2nd ed. (Apr 9, 2014, addition of GCC history), 1st ed. (May 2, 2010) ↩
- This quote by Ernst F. Schumacher is often incorrectly attributed to Einstein ↩
- Martin Luther King’s actual phrase was “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”, 1965 You can see an example of this in Ian Hogarth’s discussion about the contest between tokamak and stellerator in the evolution of nuclear fusion technology. (Short version: the tomkamak surged ahead despite its complexity to operate as it was easy to design, but the real breakthrough will likely be achieved by the stellerator as it is simple to operate though harder to design.) ↩