Hamming, "Systems Engineering" (May 30, 1995)

Intro: Parables are often more effective than is a straight statement, so let me begin with a parable. A man was examining the construction of a cathedral. He asked a stone mason what he was doing chipping the stones, and the mason replied, "I am making stones." He asked a stone carver what he was doing, "I am carving a gargoyle." And so it went, each person said in detail what they were doing. Finally he came to an old woman who was sweeping the ground. She said, "I am helping build the cathedral."
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn" was the capstone course by Dr. Richard W. Hamming (1915-1998) for graduate students at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey California.
This course is intended to instill a "style of thinking" that will enhance one's ability to function as a problem solver of complex technical issues. With respect, students sometimes called the course "Hamming on Hamming" because he relates many research collaborations, discoveries, inventions and achievements of his own. This collection of stories and carefully distilled insights relates how those discoveries came about. Most importantly, these presentations provide objective analysis about the thought processes and reasoning that took place as Dr. Hamming, his associates and other major thinkers, in computer science and electronics, progressed through the grand challenges of science and engineering in the twentieth century.

[@aurorapolaris2242]

Hamming's 3 rules of systems engineering (paraphrased):
1. optimizing individual components will probably hurt the system as a whole
2. prepare for changes - flexible, modular designs
3. build in buffers for graceful degradation when overloaded - exactly meeting the specifications makes the system less robust.
- Systems and solutions change each other - a continual evolution.
- Presence of a solution changes the environment and produces new problems.
- A solution to the original problem usually produces both deeper insight and dissatisfactions in the engineers.
- Systems engineers need to block most of the local optimizations of the individuals and reach for the global optimization for the system. But these blocks change the environment, and the individuals change their local optimizations! (see previous point)
- Human psychology to better align individual humans' incentives with the system's goals.
- Motivating people to learn something new: figure out how to appeal / make it useful to them.
- How is their morale? What do they consider important?
- Does the new thing only work under ideal conditions? How well does it work in the field?
- Systems engineering needs domain specialists, who, between jobs, need to return to their specialties to maintain their expertise. But they face pressure from management to stay "just a little longer" to put out yet another fire.
- Systems engineering is difficult to teach; it must be lived. New people need to be brought into systems engineering teams (and old people gradually removed).
- The client knows the symptoms but probably doesn't know the phenomenon or the root causes. The systems engineer needs to theorize, formulate / define / identify the phenomenon (like a doctor synthesising information to come up with a diagnosis).
- Without good theorizing, it's easy to solve the wrong problem.
- Better a rough solution to almost the right problem, than a precise solution to a wrong problem.
- Example of emerging phenomena (concepts and objectives) with Nike missiles:
- 1 plane, 1 missile:
- objective: hit the plane.
- A fleet of planes, a battery of missiles:
- objective: hit as many planes as we can
- new concept: coordinate missiles to hit different planes.
- A nation to defend, many missile batteries:
- new concept: how much would it cost the enemy to cause 1 value-unit of damage?
- objective: make every value-unit of damage equally costly to the enemy.
- Concentrate defense on valuable / vulnerable targets
- When every value-unit of damage is equally costly, the enemy cannot gain an advantage by cleverly choosing targets.

[@SahilZen42]

System engineering
I would say it's more than a sum of its parts.
The optimization of a particular component doesn't increase the efficiency of system.
We have to bang around from all sides to get perfection....

[@makotomiyakoshi]

23:19 One of the parts of design is graceful degradation when you exceed design specifications. The bridge sags a bit more. We don't carry quite such a load, but we don't collapse immediately in the central office. Graceful degradation of the system under overload is essential.

[@makotomiyakoshi]

33:46 You learn it by osmosis by doing.