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absinthe complexity Recently, a bottle of absinthe (also known as wormwood wine; pelinkovac in Croatian) caught my attention. I know that, usually more for the ‘originality’ in marketing then flavor, producers put a couple of other herbs besides wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) into their wormwood wines. Well, how about twenty-two of them!? [ROLLOVER, Latin names are highlighted.] First thought was, it’s ‘the more the better’ appro- ach, currently so imposing in market economy. Wait, it could be an abuse of complex system fame: with so many ingredients, who would expect something definite in the drink flavor and/or consequences? My knowledge of complex systems is rather limited but it looks to me that complexity arises when the interaction of some system elements gets amplified above ‘normal’ (i.e. linear) character and, as a consequence, large effects happen somewhere in the system, not necessarily in the parts where amplification happened. In a simple system it is possible to compute the future while in a complex system small changes in one part of the system can produce large and unpredictable disturbances somewhere else. So, while in a description of a simple system you are expected to give exact answers, for a complex system you can hide your doubts (and ignorance) behind uncertainties and probabilities. |
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