Comment by r0ze-at-hn

Developing a rigorous scientific definition of what make complex systems persist.

The opposite of the favorite questions: Why did that company I worked for fail? Why did Rome collapse? Why do people get old and die?

Combining information theory with thermodynamics and control theory you get: 1) A set of six pillars that all systems that persist must have. 2) A fundamental 'Action' that all of these systems take. 3) A set of three rules for how system that persists must subdivide

This lets you do things like look at something that is failing and know that there are the 6 pillars and you can then identify them to determine what is failing. (For example there is a system that clears that brain of amyloid plaque and it can fail).

I have applied this to countless systems including Religion, Language, AI Models, Business, the cell, quantum physics, number theory and much more. It is a Rosetta Stone for persistent systems. When there is an unsolved problem in one domain I can map it through this to any other domain that has already solved it.

Note that this doesn't apply to all complex systems, only those that persist.

And to keep this HackerNews related, been applying it to LLM's as they are just a stream of tokens that try to persist to incredible success I might add. Being able to pull from any domain do this brand new field is a giant cheat code.