Antifragility

Antifragility is a concept developed by Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and a term he coined in his book, Antifragile. Antifragility refers to systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.[1] As Taleb explains in his book, antifragility is fundamentally different from the concepts of resiliency (i.e. the ability to recover from failure) and robustness (that is, the ability to resist failure). The concept has been applied in risk analysis,[2][3] physics,[4] molecular biology,[5][6] transportation planning,[7][8] engineering,[9][10] [11] and computer science.[10][12][13][14][15]

Taleb defines it as follows:

Simply, antifragility is defined as a convex response to a stressor or source of harm (for some range of variation), leading to a positive sensitivity to increase in volatility (or variability, stress, dispersion of outcomes, or uncertainty, what is grouped under the designation "disorder cluster"). Likewise fragility is defined as a concave sensitivity to stressors, leading a negative sensitivity to increase in volatility. The relation between fragility, convexity, and sensitivity to disorder is mathematical, obtained by theorem, not derived from empirical data mining or some historical narrative. It is a priori".[16][17]

Antifragile versus robust/resilient

In his book, Taleb stresses the differences between antifragile and robust/resilient. "Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better." [1]

Antifragile versus adaptive/cognitive

An adaptive system is one that changes its behavior based on information available at time of utilization (as opposed to having the behavior defined during system design). This characteristic is sometimes referred to as cognitive. While adaptive systems allow for robustness under a variety of scenarios (often unknown during system design), they are not necessarily antifragile. In other words, the difference between antifragile and adaptive is the difference between a system that is robust under volatile environments/conditions, and one that is robust in an previously unknown environment.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House. p. 430. ISBN 9781400067824.
  2. ↑ Aven, T. (2014). The Concept of Antifragility and its Implications for the Practice of Risk Analysis. Risk Analysis.
  3. ↑ Derbyshire, J., & Wright, G. (2014). Preparing for the future: Development of an ‘antifragile’methodology that complements scenario planning by omitting causation. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 82, 215-225.
  4. ↑ Naji, A., Ghodrat, M., Komaie-Moghaddam, H., & Podgornik, R. (2014). Asymmetric Coulomb fluids at randomly charged dielectric interfaces: Anti-fragility, overcharging and charge inversion. J. Chem. Phys. 141 174704.
  5. ↑ Danchin, A., Binder, P. M., & Noria, S. (2011). Antifragility and tinkering in biology (and in business) flexibility provides an efficient epigenetic way to manage risk. Genes, 2(4), 998-1016.
  6. ↑ Grube, M., Muggia, L., & Gostinčar, C. (2013). Niches and Adaptations of Polyextremotolerant Black Fungi. In Polyextremophiles (pp. 551-566). Springer Netherlands.
  7. ↑ Levin, J. S., Brodfuehrer, S. P., & Kroshl, W. M. (2014, March). Detecting antifragile decisions and models lessons from a conceptual analysis model of Service Life Extension of aging vehicles. In Systems Conference (SysCon), 2014 8th Annual IEEE (pp. 285-292). IEEE.
  8. ↑ Isted, R. (2014, August). The use of antifragility heuristics in transport planning. In Australian Institute of Traffic Planning and Management (AITPM) National Conference, 2014, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia (No. 3).
  9. ↑ Verhulsta, E. (2014). Applying Systems and Safety Engineering Principles for Antifragility. Procedia Computer Science, 32, 842-849.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Jones, K. H. (2014). Engineering Antifragile Systems: A Change In Design Philosophy. Procedia Computer Science, 32, 870-875.
  11. ↑ Lichtman, M. (2014). Antifragile Electronic Warfare. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.5429.
  12. ↑ Ramirez, C. A., & Itoh, M. (2014, September). An initial approach towards the implementation of human error identification services for antifragile systems. In SICE Annual Conference (SICE), 2014 Proceedings of the (pp. 2031-2036). IEEE.
  13. ↑ Abid, A., Khemakhem, M. T., Marzouk, S., Jemaa, M. B., Monteil, T., & Drira, K. (2014). Toward Antifragile Cloud Computing Infrastructures. Procedia Computer Science, 32, 850-855.
  14. ↑ Monperrus, M. (2014). Principles of Antifragile Software. arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.3056.
  15. ↑ Guang, L., Nigussie, E., Plosila, J., & Tenhunen, H. (2014). Positioning Antifragility for Clouds on Public Infrastructures. Procedia Computer Science, 32, 856-861.
  16. ↑ Taleb, N. N. (2013). Philosophy:'Antifragility'as a mathematical idea. Nature, 494(7438), 430-430.
  17. ↑