This commentary argues that to fully appreciate the complexities of knowledge transfer one firstly has to distinguish between the notions of “data, information, knowledge and wisdom,” and that the latter two are highly context sensitive. In particular one has to understand knowledge as being personal rather than objective, and hence there is no form of knowledge that a-priori is more authoritat...

We introduce the notion of an “adaptive growth process” in order to explain an experimental result from the 1950s in which a complex mechanism capable of distinguishing between two sounds emerges from a homogeneous chemical solution. We present a very simple computational model which exhibits an adaptive growth process. Adaptive growth processes could have practical applications in adaptive con...

Deferred action is the axiom that agents act in emergent organisation to achieve predetermined goals. Enabling deferred action in designed artificial complex adaptive systems like business organisations and IS is problematical. Emergence is an intractable problem for designers because it cannot be predicted. We develop proof-of-concept, conceptual proto-agent model, of emergent organisation and...

This paper describes a strategy for modeling and engineering complex e-business systems with built-in quality of adaptiveness. The paper explains the philosophical and scientific foundations for research findings and for the proposed strategy. After ascertaining that complexity relates to the fact that higher levels of organization manifest features not predictable from the lower ones, the pape...

The learning capability and learning style of young learners differ from each other significantly. This paper proposes an electronic assignment book designed according to the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. A personal agent is applied which adaptively calculates the forgetting curve of the learner and adjusts the sequence of the assignments. The simulation results show that the approach can improv...

virus(es), throttle, throttling, markets, market-based control, markets, trader(s), trading, agent(s), evolution, complex adaptive system(s), selforganization, selfmanaging The Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) group at HP Labs, Bristol, was formed in November 2001 to study the science and engineering of complex, dynamic, parallel, distributed, adaptive systems, so far as they are relevant to HP's...

A model of a virtual organisation consisting of hundreds of thousands of intelligent agents has been developed by authors and their collaborators in London, UK and Samara, Russia. The model is based on ontological rather than mathematical description of the organisation and is characterised by the capability of selforganisation and evolution. It is based on the notion that organisations partici...

Current management thinking largely assumes that a well functioning organisation is akin to a well oiled machine. This leads to the notion that performance is optimised when work is specified in detail and shared out to distinct operational units. Clinicians often object to these detailed specifications, while managers bemoan a lack of cooperation. The first article in this series introduced an...