Intelligent Systems And Their Societies

Definition of The Concept "System"

So now that we have seen all these examples of systems, can we find a definition that fits them all? We have thought about it and made up the definition that follows. We believe it covers all the examples.

A system is:

Part of the universe (with a limited extension in space and time).
Stronger, more, correlations exist between one part of the system and another, than between this part of the system and parts outside the system.

We can define a "part"as the result of mentally dividing the universe. We can do this division at various levels. A part also results when we mentally divide a part.

We determine a system by (mentally) separating those parts of the universe having intense correlations with each other, from the rest of the universe. With the concept "correlation" we mean a statistical relationship between before and after. See Correlations for a more extensive explanation.

For each system there are predominant correlations. Some have gravitational, electromagnetic or communication correlations. For a specific system we can make up a list of many correlations, less and less strong. It would be impossible and unnecessary to take into account all existing correlations. Normally, when defining a system, we take into account only the strongest correlations.

We will use the above definition of "system" for the rest of this book.

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