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Highly optimized tolerance: a mechanism for power laws in designed systems.
1Department of Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA.
Summary
Highly Optimized Tolerance (HOT) generates power law distributions in engineered and biological systems. This mechanism, driven by design tradeoffs, differs from self-organized criticality, offering robust performance in uncertain environments.
Area of Science:
- Complex Systems
- Systems Biology
- Engineering Design
Background:
- Power law distributions are observed in various natural and engineered systems.
- Self-organized criticality (SOC) has been a leading explanation for power laws.
- Biological organisms and advanced technologies often exhibit optimized performance under uncertainty.
Purpose of the Study:
- Introduce a novel mechanism for power law generation: Highly Optimized Tolerance (HOT).
- Explain power laws via tradeoffs between yield, resource cost, and risk tolerance in optimized systems.
- Contrast HOT with SOC, highlighting differences in system states and power law characteristics.
Main Methods:
- Investigated the HOT mechanism using percolation and sand pile models.
- Focused on systems optimized through natural selection or engineering design.
- Analyzed tradeoffs influencing system design and performance.
Main Results:
- HOT generates power law distributions.
- HOT systems exhibit high efficiency, performance, and robustness to designed uncertainties.
- HOT systems are hypersensitive to design flaws and unanticipated perturbations.
- Power laws in HOT are not restricted to critical densities, unlike SOC.
Conclusions:
- Highly Optimized Tolerance (HOT) provides an alternative mechanism for power law generation.
- HOT emphasizes the role of design and tradeoffs in creating robust yet sensitive systems.
- HOT systems are characterized by efficiency, specialized configurations, and power laws, diverging from traditional criticality.