The definition of robustness that I like best is the ability to maintain structure or function in the presence of some disturbance. And we say this quality in a lot of complex systems. In the case of the ant colony, if I talk about structure in an ant colony, people probably laugh because we look at an ant colony and it looks terribly disorganized,. But there's a lot of functional robustness in it.
In our last episode with Tyler Marghetis, we learnt about how a complex system can tip from one state into another. But what happens when systems don't tip or fail? What makes a system robust?
In today's episode, we're talking with Karoline Wiesner, a Professor of Complexity Science in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She breaks down the characteristics of a robust system, through the context of an incredibly robust complex system — the ant colony.
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