is a favourite word of mine, but a frustrating state to be in.

Everything about about socialsoftware tends to flummox: the scale and complexity of interactions, the wide range of theories around social interaction to the details of design, development and sustainable operation.

It’s mindboggling to a poor pixelpusher like me.

Today’s been flummoxing. Spent most of the post-lunch doldrums trying to recuperate from an intense and (I think) valuable brainstorm this morning about the socialsoftware project I’m working on.

Right now I can’t mention much about the detail of what we talked through, but one thing that was brought up that has fascinated me for years was the physical modellling of complex systems that was still in evidence well into the times of widespread digital computation and simulation. I just spent a while trying to find a picture of one of the conrtraptions that economists used to use to model national economies with flows of coloured water running through interconnected pipes of varying diameter, but to no avail. Can anyone point me to something about what I’m attempting to describe?

Anyway, just as I thought I was recovering, a wander through meatball in search of how virtual communities can be encouraged to tip-over into real-life activity leads me to something that genuinely not only flummoxed me, but left me boggled to boot: “Cheap Complex Devices”:

” This is the fact: these books were written not by human hand but by computer program. It’s only natural to wonder, How did it do that? And, Why can’t I? Even if they had been poorly written, the simple fact of their existence would be astonishing enough, and we would admire them as curios, like the dog riding the bicycle. And we would want, naturally, to understand the workings of the programs that conjured them up. One might think that the better the novels the greater the curiosity about the mechanics of their origins, but, paradoxically, in the face of their compelling essence, we cease to care so much about how they got here. Kasparov said that at its best, the chess-playing program called Deep Blue “played like God.” At some point the mechanics of the program become irrelevant and the beauty of the play becomes the thing, as who would claim to understand God’s logic?

No claim of Godhead is made for the “authors” of Bonehead and Bees. But these novels do move us in the way novels are supposed to move us. They make us laugh. They make us cry. They keep us up late night turning pages to see what happens next. We care about the characters in The Bonehead Computer Museum and in Bees, or The Floating Point Error, characters unmistakably human. How are we to understand their provenance? Do we need to? It is to these questions that we now turn our attention.”

Whoa.