International Journal of Engineering Issues

Vol. 2015, no. 1, pp. 33-39

ISSN: 2458-651X
Copyright Infinity Sciences

The Physics of Evolving Complex Software Systems

Prof. T V Gopal
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Anna University, Chennai 600 025, India
e-mail: [email protected]
Abstract- Software has been the adhesive for many multidisciplinary systems. The core engineering disciplines
have been banking on the well formulated design principles unlike Software. Yet, Software Engineers celebrate
complexity. This paper is on exploring the physics of Cyber - Physical Systems. It is based on mathematical
foundations and positions the analog systems in the digital space of the evolving dynamics of design, development
and use.
Keywords: Cyber Physical Systems, Complexity, Infinity, Infinitesimals, Computing, Computational Models
I. INTRODUCTION
"According to Turing-Church, all physically realizable dynamics are equivalent to computation..."
- Michael Conrad
"Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it
always increases."
- Norman R. Augustine
It would be fatuous to assume that every man is constantly aware of the details of his surroundings. I do not believe this
to be true. But I am convinced that a well-set dinner table will aid the flow of gastric juices; that a well-lighted and
planned classroom is conducive to study; that carefully selected colors chosen with an eye to psychological influence
will develop better and more lucrative work habits for the man at the machine; that a quietly designed conference room
at the United Nations headquarters might well help influence the representatives to make a calm and just decision. I
believe that man achieves his tallest measure of serenity when surrounded by beauty. We find our most serene moments
in great cathedrals, in the presence of fine pictures and sculpture, on a university campus, or listening to magnificent
music. Industry, technology, and mass production have made it possible for the average man to surround himself with
this serenity in his home and in his place of work. Perhaps it is this serenity which we need most in the world, today.
Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People, 1955
Evolving Complex Software Systems have thus made their design an intriguing blend of Art, Science, Discipline and the
Psychology of the stakeholders who make them by design. The specifications of these systems are invariably replete
with contradictions, ambiguities, vagueness, incompleteness and mixed levels of abstraction. The true challenge is to
design and develop collaborative systems around notions of space which mimic the spatial organization of the real world
and then support the emergent patterns of human behavior and interaction which are exhibited by everyday actions in the
physical world.
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For the mathematical technician these complications may provide a useful discipline. The person who wants to
understand the place of mathematics in modern civilization is merely distracted and disheartened by them. What follows
is for those who have been already disheartened and distracted, and have consequently forgotten what they may have
learned already, or fail to see the meaning or usefulness of what they remember. So we shall begin at the very
beginning.
- Lancelot Hogben, Mathematics for the Million, 1936
Konrad Zuse was the first to propose that physics is just computation, suggesting that the history of our
universe is being computed on, say, a cellular automaton. His "Rechnender Raum" (Computing Cosmos / Calculating
Space) started the field of Digital Physics in 1967. Today, more than three decades later, his paradigm-shifting ideas are
becoming popular.
In the 1940s cybernetics began as a formal approach to the description of any physical system in a framework
that specified the boundaries, information flows, and goals. Cybernetics has developed the means to model and apply
metrics to the otherwise subjective human activities of conversation and collaboration. By enhancing the models of task
analysis, workflow, and interaction design, cybernetics provides a toolset for designing successful and human-focused
systems.
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra clearly stated that learning physics was real turning point in his comprehension of the
discipline of computing. Many theories have been developed independently and what is in practice is a narrow
intersection of a few of them. Software Cybernetics being proposed in this paper is a more comprehensive integration of
some of these theories.
II. ARCHITECTING THE AUTOMATON
The word "automaton" is the latinization of the Greek automaton, (neuter) "acting of ones own will". This
word was first used by Homer to describe automatic door opening, or automatic movement of wheeled tripods. An
automaton (plural: automata or automatons) is a self-operating machine / artifact.
An automaton is a model of computation which
Executes a step - by - step procedure / method pertaining to a problem specification
Is operated using a pre-defined set of allowable operations used in computation and their respective costs
Has a behavior of the whole system resulting from the behavior of each of its components.
Has some components in the whole system that indicate or specify the "Ground Reality" / Limits.
During the times of Norbert Wiener, servomechanisms in industry, target seeking missiles in the military, and
problems of coordinating the war effort, not to forget the emerging mechanization of computation, demanded new
vocabularies to understand them. It was no surprise that Wiener defined cybernetics as a science, the science of control
and communication.
However, it was engineers who were the first to problematize cybernetic phenomena. They also were the first
to use the cybernetic theories and principles as a way to extend their ability to design them. It was Claude Elwood
Shannon who postulated that where communication was unambiguous, transmitting a message was an engineering
problem.
A well-engineered automaton is expressed using the following mathematical foundations.
1.
Complex Numbers and Geometry of Complex Plane
2.
Holomorphic Functions and their representation
3.
Harmonic Functions
4.
Residue Theorem
5.
Fourier Transform
6.
Anti-Foundation Axiom
This is the mathematics for designing and developing the evolving complex software systems.
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We all realize that we're kind of surrounded with technology: there's little device here recording us, there's tables,
chairs, spoons, light bulbs. Each of these things seem pretty mechanical, pretty inert in a certain sense, not very
interactive, you know, a hammer, roads. But each one of these technologies actually requires many other technologies to
make and produce. So your little thing in your pocket that you use for a phone might require thousands of other
technologies to create it and support it and keep it going, and each of those technologies may require hundreds of
thousands of subtechnologies below it. And that network of different technologies and the co-dependency that each of
those technologies have on each other forms a virtual organism, a super organism.
We can keep stepping back and realize that all these technologies are in some ways co-dependent and related and
connected to each other in some way and that largest of all the networks of all these technologies together I call the
Technium.
Kevin Kelly
The author defines the technium as a Cyber Physical Systems. An automaton models a given thing in the
Cyber Physical System [5]. The most fundamental concept in cybernetics is that of "difference," either that two things
are recognizably different or that one thing has changed over time. The term differential is used in calculus to refer to
an infinitesimal (infinitely small) change in some varying quantity. If x is a variable, then a change in the value of x is
often denoted as delta x [dx].
Infinitesimal quantities play a significant role in calculus. Archimedes used them, even though he didn't believe
that arguments involving infinitesimals were rigorous. Isaac Newton referred to them as fluxions. Gottfried Leibniz
called them differentials and introduced the notation that is used today. In this notation, the differential dx represents
an infinitely small change in the variable x. Differentials are also used in the notation for integrals. The area under a
graph is obtained by subdividing the graph into infinitely thin strips and summing their areas.
Analog computes [13,18] were the first to model the continuously changeable aspects of physical phenomena
such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities. Setting up an analog computer requires scale factors to be chosen,
along with initial condition. Another mandatory effort was to create the required network of interconnections amongst
the computing elements. Often times the Cyber Physical Systems do note lend themselves to the degree of clarity
necessary to set up the Analog Computer.
III. LIMITS IN CYBER PHYSICAL SYSTEMS
The foundational point of the creation of the Calculus was for an easy mathematical approach for the most
reasonable estimation. Trying to use this and its derivative statistical approaches to identify individual entities and their
behavior and properties only increases the difficulty exponentially.
Physics has limitations imposed by the very nature of physical reality. Mathematics may provide both real and
virtual solutions it is, in and of itself, not limited. Mathematics applied to Physics must be limited, simply by the limits
imposed by Physics.
Newton had been approaching calculus primarily in regards to its applications to physics, he purported curves
to be the creation of the motion of points while perceiving velocity to be the primary derivative. Conversely, the calculus
of Leibniz [12] was applied more to discoveries in geometry made by scholars such as Descartes and Pascal. Since
"Leibniz' approach was geometrical," the notation of the differential calculus and many of the general rules for
calculating derivatives are still used today. Leibnitz based his calculus on the concept of infinitesimals positive
quantities less than any positive number. Leibnitz needed many orders of infinitesimals.
The concept was that of a process (or calculation) whose results were getting ever-smaller so that if inspected,
the value of the infinitesimal would be smaller than any named positive real number, and yet the infinitesimal is not
zero! There is a curious affinity between infinitesimals and zero numbers, even though they are quite different.
Infinitesimals are not zero, but they adhere to zero. Powers of zero are not zero, but they are not at any distance from
zero.
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In other words, an infinitesimal is a number whose magnitude exceeds zero but somehow fails to exceed any
finite positive number. Although logically problematic, infinitesimals are extremely appealing for modeling continuous
phenomena.
Leibniz proposed a "universal character for 'objects of imagination'". He argued that a kind of alphabet of
human thoughts can be worked out and that everything can be discovered and judged by a comparison of the letters of
this alphabet and an analysis of the words made from them. However, the logicians never constructed Leibnitz
infinitesimals and proved their being on a line. They only postulated it. The positive infinitesimals are smaller than any
positive real number, yet strictly greater than zero. The negative infinitesimals are greater than any negative real number,
yet strictly smaller than zero.
The theoretical results of Mathematical Logic proposed by the likes of Church, Turing, Godel et al and
practical problems in programming [1] severely limit the mechanization of Intelligence. Often times machinization of
solutions for a class of problems is incorrectly deemed similar to automation.
Software Cybernetics is being proposed in this paper to explore:
the formalization of feedback and self-adaptive control mechanisms in software
the adaptation of control theory principles to software processes and systems
the application of software engineering principles and theories to control systems, and
the integration of the theories of software engineering and control engineering.
This paper positions the notion of computing away from the machine architecture [1] and attempts to capture
the forms that the human mind perceives through the calculus of geometry propounded by Leibnitz [2,4]. The
mathematics of infinitesimals applied to engineering and technology results in the formalisms such as differential
geometry, algebraic geometry, synthetic differential geometry, non-standard analysis and noncommutative geometry.
The following aspects of Evolving Complex Software Systems become more amenable to analysis and design.
Interconnected and interdependent elements and dimensions
Feedback processes promote and inhibit change within systems
System characteristics and behaviors emerge from simple rules of interaction
Nonlinearity
Sensitivity to initial conditions
Phase space the space of the possible
Attractors, chaos and the edge of chaos
Adaptive agents
Self-organization
Co-evolution
Some of the characteristics of such systems are:
Small inputs can lead to dramatically large consequences
An infinitesimal change in the initial conditions can produce very different outcomes
Global properties flow from aggregate behavior of individuals
Patterns that learn and adapt through interactions with the environment or context of their usage.
Attractors that result in the states to which the system eventually settles depending on its properties
Limits and infinitesimals enable architecting the automata that share the same properties as the original Cyber
Physical System [10,16,17]. The architecture can be visualized through graphics and a grammar of graphics provides
insights into the underling deep structure.

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IV. GRAMMAR OF GRAPHICS
"On a large software project one is lucky if one person in 50 has anything resembling an overall understanding of the
conceptual structure of the project, and divinely blessed if that person has the ability to explain it in lay terms"
- G. Robinson
Cyber Physical systems [9] have many autonomous components, i.e., the basic building blocks are the
individual agents of the system. There are a large number of useful potential arrangements of their elements. The
elements are heterogeneous (differ in important characteristics), i.e. have variety. The system boundary is often hard to
pin down. The structure and behavior of a Cyber Physical System is neither deducible, nor be inferred from the
structure and behavior of its component parts. Generally the behavior involves non-deterministic, nonlinear dynamics,
sometimes chaos, and rarely any long-run equilibrium. Often times the agents are organized into groups or hierarchies;
in which case the structure influences the evolution of the system. Such structures tend to highlight a number of different
scales, any of which can affect the behavior of the system. These systems are self-organizing (show a decrease in
entropy due to utilizing energy from the environment).
Cyber Physical Systems adapt to their environment as they evolve. In particular, as they evolve they
continually increase their own complexity, given a steady influx of energy (raw resources) and feedback amongst the
various components. The components change in response to imposed pressures from neighboring components. These
systems display emergent macro-level behavior that emerges from the actions and interactions of the individual
components. Cyber Physical Systems can be said to encompass not only one or more system artifacts but also the
designers and users of these artifacts.
Cyber Physical Systems are systems that do not have a centralizing authority and are not designed from a
known specification, but instead involve disparate stakeholders creating systems that are functional for other purposes
and are only brought together because the individual artifacts of the system see such cooperation as being beneficial
for them.
Understanding how a Cyber Physical System is difficult primarily because the participants themselves do not
understand how it operates. The analysis never starts with the information needed to develop a mathematical
representation. Representation of the system as a cognitive model that is verifiable, shared and accurate is not readily
amenable to formal mathematical representation. Getting a useful model depends critically upon what is the purpose of
the representation and what facets of the system will be analyzed.
Architecting automata that model a Cyber Physical System [6,7] is becoming increasingly graphical over
time. This has resulted in an explosion of visualization techniques and tools that range from basic charting to 3D, big
data and Geographical Information Systems visualization. However, all of them deem visualization as a separate entity,
and struggle to have provide a common behavior across visualizations and platforms. Adoption of multiple visualization
tools across systems further compounds these problems.
The Grammar of Graphics [19, 20] approach allows us to define a common language for all types of
visualization. The language approach to specifying visualization provides much more control to adopters while
maintaining consistency. The language approach also allows the same specification to be interpreted across platforms to
give consistent appearance and interaction across devices.
V. INFINITESIMALS, SYMBOLIC GRAPHICS AND SYSTEM DYNAMICS
This paper illustrates the role of infinitesimals in modeling the dynamics of the Cyber Physical Systems
through Attractors.
Attractors are patterns in system dynamics. They are usually geometric patterns. It is vital and to represent these
geometric patterns symbolically. Symbolic dynamics relates the continuous mathematics of iterations on real and
complex spaces to the discrete mathematics of computation and formal linguistics - generically a language of expressing
the corresponding automata.
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Examples:
A bracket of Leibnitz structure can describe several dynamical systems with time delay as vector fields
associated to smooth functions [11]
Leibnitz Algebroids [3, 14]
A Metriplectic (or Leibniz) structure [15]
The evolution of complexity [7] in Nature and Society can be understood as the evolution of the complex
software system. Infinitesimals provide a way of modeling the natural automata based on the hierarchy of natural
systems from stones and plants up to animals and humans. The information and work flows in such systems that range
from stable, oscillating, chaotic and random can be distinguished methodically.
There have been some recent efforts in specifying languages for programming with Infinitesimals. WHILE
Language for Hybrid System Modeling [8] is one example.
The author is working on Anti-Foundation Axiom, Literate Programming and Software Aesthetics as two best practices
that may result in deciding early the beautiful solutions that can be verified and validated.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
This paper proposes a mathematical approach to architect the automata that model the Cyber Physical Systems and
hence paving way for developing better software systems for the 14 Grand Challenges in Engineering [21] mentioned
below.
1. Make solar energy economical
2. Provide energy from fusion
3. Develop carbon sequestration methods
4. Manage the nitrogen cycle
5. Provide access to clean water
6. Restore and improve urban infrastructure
7. Advance health informatics and practice of Medicine
8. Engineer better medicines
9. Reverse-engineer the brain
10. Prevent nuclear terror
11. Secure cyberspace with methods better than the traditional practices
12. Enhance virtual reality
13. Advance personalized learning
14. Engineer the tools of scientific discovery
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author places on record his sincere thanks to Anna University, Chennai, the members of the Steering Committee of
the Series of Annual Conferences on Theory and Applications of Models of Computation [TAMC] and the Conference
Chairs of the IEEE Series of Conferences on Norbert Wiener in the 21 st Century.
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