scaling simplicity

entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

Mindar is an AI Bodhisattva: she appears as an incarnation of the most popular Buddhist deity, Kannon, in the Kodai-ji temple in Kyoto. Kodai-ji was founded by Nene, the widow of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of Japan’s most important warlords. Belonging to the Rinzai lineage of Japanese Zen Buddhism, the temple bears her nun’s name, Kodai-in.

Zen is a mental discipline with a strong emphasis on radical simplicity. That a Zen temple is home to the first AI deity seems quite fitting in this respect.

The word radical has its origin in the Latin radix (“root”). In its neutral interpretation it refers to essentials, to relatively simple foundations from which many things can be developed. Fundamentals are usually simpler than what emerges from them.

Radical simplicity is not an invention of the Far East. For example, Ockham’s Razor expresses radical simplicity in the sense of an “economy of thought”: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem is often loosely translated as “less is more.” I chose it as the first decorative quotation in my doctoral thesis.

The universal genius Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz also dealt with radically fundamental ideas, such as the binary number system. A famous quotation by him reads: omnibus ex nihilo ducendis sufficit unum — “to produce everything from nothing (zero), one is sufficient.”

Saint-Exupéry called for maximum simplification as a condition of perfection, which “is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Sometimes, therefore, perfection lies in imperfection, as expressed in the Japanese term wabi sabi. One of the most famous Japanese Zen gardens, at Ryōan-ji monastery, is a successful union of both principles:

Ryōan-ji also belongs to the Rinzai Zen school, which differs from the other major school, Sōtō, in that it deals intensively with paradoxes in order to free the mind.

In Zen, one seeks a simple, unadulterated perception — an integration of thinking and feeling — whereby creativity and intuition are enhanced as welcome side effects. For this reason, Zen is popular among many creatively active people; a prominent follower, for example, was Steve Jobs. His radically simple design choices were heavily influenced by Zen.

Zen is also an essential part of many traditional Japanese arts that include dō in their name, especially martial arts (Jūdō, Karatedō, Kendō, Kyūdō…). Dō stands for “the way.”

In martial arts there is a clear hierarchy: technique is valued more highly than muscle power, but mind is above technique. For true masters, technical command is trivial; the outcome of a fight is decided primarily in the mind. While combat sports focus mainly on strength and technique, traditional Japanese martial arts emphasize mental discipline.

A recurring concept in this context is the art of “attacking the 10,000 things in one” — in other words, maximum reduction to the essential building blocks of the discipline. This, in turn, fits surprisingly well with the roots of artificial intelligence. Jürgen Schmidhuber, regarded as the father of modern AI, interprets consciousness as a side effect of data compression in problem-solving processes.

Miyamoto Musashi was one of Japan’s most famous swordsmen. His Book of Five Rings remains an internationally popular reference work on management and strategy even after 400 years.

In this calligraphy he describes the “spirit of war.” I chose it as a decorative quotation for the final chapter of my doctoral thesis, which dealt with knowledge quality and disinformation in organizations.

While Musashi’s bestseller focused on the Zen mind (the quality of knowledge, so to speak), Sun Tzu’s Art of War emphasizes the importance of information asymmetries in strategy. At two and a half thousand years old, this work is even more influential than Musashi’s Go Rin no Sho.

As the central theme of my PhD project, with a strong focus on cybernetics, I chose fractal geometry, which was popular at the time. It deals with dynamic equilibria and very complex systems, which nevertheless emerge from radically simple procedures. Fractals not only fit well with Zen philosophy because of their radically simple, generative rules, but can also be interpreted as expressions of wabi sabi due to their characteristically “broken” dimensions. What fascinates me most, however, is their immediate, vivid complexity combined with radically simple ground rules.

Thus in some cases extreme complexity can at the same time be radically simple.

Good generative systems achieve very high information density. A famous example is Queneau’s 100,000 Billion Poems. These fit into only 10 pages, each with one sonnet, where the single lines of a poem can be combined with other lines from other pages. Such purely symbolic combinatorics is, however, relatively trivial — even considering the “great art” of Ramon Llull. Llull, a 12th-century Mallorcan nobleman, developed a brilliant system for “generating all the truths of Christianity” and is regarded as a forefather of artificial intelligence.

Yet purely symbolic, combinatorial wordplay is not in itself great art. The real challenge is to create something empirically effective from a very simple blueprint — from first principles.

Ideally, one develops generative systems that also encompass useful solution potentials not even conceived at the time of design.

Such radical approaches have been popularized in recent years by the serial disruptor Elon Musk, making him one of the richest men in the world.

Musk operates mainly in engineering. The fields of application related to organizational design may be less spectacular, but they are by no means less lucrative — and they require significantly fewer resources:

cyberCortex® is a radically simple technical solution to the fundamental problems of organization.