Excerpt

The epigraph of this paper is from Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game. This novel takes place many centuries hence, and to play the eponymous game requires a deep synthesis of the arts and sciences. The epigraph appears in the third line of the following paragraph (translated using Google Translate):

So don’t expect a complete history and theory of the Glass Bead Game from us, and authors more dignified and skillful than us would not be able to do that today. This task is reserved for later times if the sources and the intellectual prerequisites for it are not lost beforehand. And this essay of ours is even less intended to be a textbook on the Glass Bead Game, such a one will never be written. One does not learn the rules of this game of games in any other way than in the usual, prescribed way, which requires many years, and none of the initiates could ever have an interest in making these rules easier to learn.

Thus marks the beginning, over sixty years ago, of John Holland’s pursuit in understanding the behavior of what he would eventually come to call “complex adaptive systems.”

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