Conversation

Has anyone ever done a systematic study of the laws of engineered systems? Like how we have laws of physics and principles of biology? Thinking stuff like: - they have lots of right angles - they have pure materials - weak fractal structure - symmetries etc
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making those kinds of heuristics explicit is in a sense, the goal of Design for Manufacturability practices; in that they tell you what sort of designs are easiest to make with extant manufacturing techniques
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the key is to identify the design space parameters and figure out of the object occupies a local maxima; engineered objects tend to be closer to global maxima. look for redundancies, evidence of construction vs growth. if you have multiple exemplars measure variability
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Organic vs Inorganic sums it up. Organic stuff has a continuous (non-discrete) transition across materials/form, structure, function..making it hard to draw a boundary. Inorganic stuff has distinct boundaries of materials, structure, functional transition.
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Hmm. I think things can be engineered without being made by humans. Here's a beaver dam and a bowerbird bower. So I think we have this "nonhuman engineered or natural" problem even without aliens. Unless you consider these structures "natural".
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Yea, that's an interesting question. It's probably something like object mass / Kolmogorov complexity - ie engineered systems are actually very low complexity compared to natural ones.
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