Redundancy alone is simply not enough. Redundancy does play a role, but it's not the only thing that plays a role. The fact that I can scoop up a thousand ants from a colony doesn't hurt the colony too much because there are at least another ten thousand that could take that place. And if there had been more ants, then the system would have been more robust.
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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