R.Morley Inc.'s The Barn's Conferences

The following list represents but a sample of some of our distinguished speakers and the topics of their presentations. For a complete list, contact Amanda Lapierre.

Report on Chaos in Manufacturing Conference - April '99

By : Jim Pinto
Action Instruments
San Diego, CA.

The seventh annual Chaos in Manufacturing Conference was held at Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 13-16, '99. This meeting is the brain-child of Dick Morley - inventor, industry visionary, hall-of-famer, author, angel investor and founder of several companies. Dick Morley gathers together a group of forward-thinkers, consultants, academics and business strategists to re-examine, re-define and move ahead with still developing paradigms based on artificial life, genetic algorithms, emergent behavior and autonomous agents - all branches of the new science of complexity. All this relates to Chaos Theory, which was popularized by Jim Gleick in his book Chaos - Making A New Science. This conference brings together people who are interested in practical applications relating to management and manufacturing.

This year, the meeting was co-sponsored by the BIOS Group LP, a partnership between Stuart Kauffman and the Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation, and by Boston-based AMR Research. Dr. Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow, was one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute. BIOS group provides development services that apply the principles of complexity science to business problems. AMR is the Boston-based market analysis firm specializing in enterprise applications and technologies.

Dick Morley is a master of the "art" of brain-storming - thinking outside the box - and most people attend this conference to participate in that kind of thinking. Dick is ably assisted by Bob de Simone - his "straight man" - who organizes all the gory details from their base at "The Barn" in New Hampshire. The venue for this annual Chaos Conference is Santa Fe, New Mexico, chosen to be near the prestigious Santa Fe Institute, the think tank that is linked with several Nobel laureates and the home of Artificial Life. (www.SantaFe.edu). Indeed, some of the speakers are drawn from SFI and similar institutions. Past speakers include Stuart Kauffman (Critical Complexity, Fitness Landscapes), Murray Gel-Mann (Nobel prize in Physics, author of the popular book - "The Quark and the Jaguar"), Chris Langton (acknowledged originator of Artificial Life Science) and John Holland (inventor of the Genetic Algorithm).

This year again, attendance was split between a sprinkling of regulars (I have made the pilgrimage to Santa Fe for 6 years out of the 7) and several newcomers, perhaps attracted by the reputations of Morley and
some of the other speakers. Or perhaps they were just part of the bush-telegraph system that has been built up over the years to make this Conference what it has become - a catalyst for new thinking related to practical applications of complexity science. About 40 people attended this year.

At this time of year, Santa Fe is deceptively bright and dry, yet near freezing. Spouses and companions seem to find lots to do in the area - but somehow the conference attendees seem to stick close to the home base, perhaps unwilling to lose the germ of a gem that might emerge spontaneously during the sessions or at the informal meetings that continue unabated during the evenings and until quite late at night. Everyone gravitates towards beer and nuts in Morley's suite, and the conversation freewheels. Who knows what seeds will sprout....

The first day, Tuesday, was for "rookies" - with a tutorial entitled "Termites, Taxicabs and Manufacturing Systems" by Dr. Van Parunak from the ERIM Center for Electronic Commerce. This was followed by a tutorial given by Morley and others on the concepts, trends and developments in Supply Chain Management, a topic that is impacted by the techniques of complexity theory.

On Wednesday, the newly initiated were joined by an accumulation of aficionados, to get to the meat of the conference. Dr. George Markowsky, University of Maine Professor of Computer Science, a regular Morley cohort, discussed Agents in Complex Systems. This was followed by juicy chaos topics - to whit : Dynamic Load Balancing, Solving real Problems with Complexity Theory, Complexity Solutions for Manufacturing and Logistics and Chaos Creeping into Large Military Systems. Each of these discussed chaos-theory applications and put the conference on a path to practical handling of problems previously considered intractable.

On Thursday, Dr. Laurie Fitzgerald discussed "Lessons from Jurassic Park " - the illusion of control in a situation that was at best chaotic. Next, there was and SFI presentation on Swarm Architecture, a subject and company in which Chris Langton, the founder of Artificial Life Science at SFI, is now active. Albert Baker discussed Supply Chain Solutions for Mass Customization. Then Profession Tom Ray from the University of Oklahoma and SFI affiliate, on Evolution in the Digital Medium, presented a practical demonstration of artificial life that is not limited to physical constraints in 3 dimensions, with intelligence measurement that is beyond the classic Turing Test. David Bell from Canada closed the day with a passionate warning that the old deterministic and control-orientated systems of capitalism and democracy are breaking down, requiring chaos theory as a "Survival language".

The Conference moved to a close on Friday with a view of the future, well into the next century, in a speech by Jim Pinto entitled - "The Age of the Spiritual Machine - When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence". With the power of computers doubling every 18 months (Moore's Law) computer intelligence is expected to equal that of humans by the year 2020 - and then what? Jim discussed the possibilities and probabilities of what might develop during the first century of a new millennium.

Morley closed with a review of all that was learned, and a discussion of what might be expected. He stimulated all participants to discuss what subjects would be welcomed in future conferences - as Complexity Theory and Artificial Life emerge from seemingly fringe sciences into the main-stream of modern life. FROM BILL SWANTON AT AMR.

Alert on Manufacturing for April 16, 1999 COMPLEXITY THEORY ATTRACTS PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS AMR Research participated in the Chaos in Manufacturing conference in Santa Fe this week, taking a look at how complexity theory can be applied to manufacturing and business applications. Dick Morley, who is a frequent speaker at AMR Research conferences, organizes the conference. Complexity theory, popularly known as Chaos, can be used to explain many situations commonly seen in manufacturing plants, especially where small problems and changes can cascade to make actual events unpredictable. Like predicting the weather, where many of these concepts originated, small changes in initial conditions cause large changes in the outcome. The behavior of the overall system can be predicted, but what happens to a specific job or operation can vary widely. The major take away for manufacturers is that any system must accept and work in a potentially chaotic environment. While this may sound somewhat esoteric, there are practical applications. Much of the research focuses on using Complex Adaptive Systems to solve complex problems with highly changeable conditions. The solutions often look to nature for models, the most common being the self-organizing behavior of ants finding food for their anthill. The ants, or agents governed by simple rules, quickly find fairly optimized routes to food in the area of the nest.

The Bios Group, a spinoff of the Santa Fe Institute, is now commercializing these techniques. The company showed a variety of projects including dispatching of service personnel and scheduling of a Food/CPG plant. Flavors Technology demonstrated an early version of a line balancing system for auto body welding it is developing under an NIST contract. In the area of current events, we even heard how these techniques are used by the military for mission planning in the Balkans. This year, the group expanded the scope of its inquiry to supply chain processes. Given that the Travelling Salesman Problem is a favorite of the academics for testing their theories, Complex Adaptive Systems will probably have a bright future here. The biggest impediment, as always, is the mistaken belief that real systems with constantly changing conditions can be optimized. Despite attempts by a "gorilla" to directly control the supply chain, each participant is an "agent" with rules to optimize its own business within the environment. The lessons of Complex Adaptive System theory are not just technical or far in the future. It does a very good job of modeling organizations and trying out new "rules" for individuals that may result in an desirable emergent behavior. How should a worker decide what to work on next? When should maintenance activities be put into the production schedule? How do I set up systems so they continue to work under highly variable demand and a steady influx of product line changes? AMR Research found some interesting parallels between the advice we give to clients on plant architecture and the design rules for agents. In both cases, plants and their components need a high degree of autonomy to react to local conditions, while fostering behavior that meets the goals of the larger organization. One design tenet is to have the lowest levels of the organization operate on simple rules, not by command and control. (Think kanban.) Higher level agents can be used to detect problems, but should not be used to correct them. (Think REPAC's ANALYZE function.) One final thought. Many agent-based systems work on a bidding principle. For example, each agent, such as an order that needs to be processed, gets bids from production resource agents and goes to the resource that gives it the lowest bid. These systems can easily go out of control, exhibiting behavioral lock-in where all the orders go after the same resource. This is more likely to happen the more frequently information is updated and the more accurate it is. Complex adaptive system developers avoid this problem by delaying information or adding noise (uncertainty) to the information. Applying this idea to trends in business systems, do we really want all the information on the factory floor or the supply chain instantly available to everyone in the enterprise?

1999

Tom Ray
Santa Fe Institute

Mark Daniels
Santa Fe Institute

1998

Murray Gell-Mann
Nobel Laureate & The Santa Fe Institute

Melanie Mitchell
The Santa Fe Institute

Steen Rasmussen
The Santa Fe Institute & Los Alamos National Labs

1997

Stuart Daw
Oak Ridge National Laboratories
"Chaos in Combustion"

John Holland
University of Michigan & The Santa Fe Institute
"Emergence: Models, Metaphors and Innovation"

Martin Wilderger
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)
"Modeling the Emergent Competitive Electric Enterprise as a Complex Adaptive System"

1996

John Casti
Santa Fe Institute
"Manufacturing as a System-Determined Science"

Stu Kaufmann
Santa Fe Institute
"Self-Organization in Parallel Networks of Biology and Business"

H. Van Dyke Parunak
Industrial Technology Institute
"Termites, Taxicabs, and Manufacturing Systems"

1995

Mike Haluska
ADI Corporation
"Merging Constraint Theory and Chaos for Profit and Management of a Manufacturing Enterprise"

Karl Kempf
Intel Corporation
"Chaos & Agents at Intel"

George Markowsky
University of Maine at Orono
"The Mathematics of Emergent Behavior"

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