Emergent Behavior
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I was in a Clubhouse room the other day, learning about nuclear micro-reactors.
Beyond Design Basis Accidents was a concept that came up during the discussion.
This term is used as a technical way to discuss accident sequences that are possible but were not fully considered in the design process because they were judged to be too unlikely. (In that sense, they are considered beyond the scope of design-basis accidents that a nuclear facility must be designed and built to withstand.) As the regulatory process strives to be as thorough as possible, "beyond design-basis" accident sequences are analyzed to fully understand the capability of a design.
With what happened with Fukushima, it begs the question, how may other beyond design-basis accidents are lurking out their in our world. This, in turn, begs the question of what is outside the design-basis?
It made me think of two incidents that happened in World of Warcraft where unexpected behavior from clever (or accidental) emergent behavior that emerged from players in World of Warcraft:
Kazzak’s Stormwind Rampage - Horde players were able to kite Kazzak, a world boss, to the Alliance Human capital city, Stormwind. This definitely was outside the design-basis of what the game designers intended.
The Corrupted Blood Incident - Also a bug that created some interesting emergent behavior. Epidemiologists actually studied the phenomenon as reference for real world human pandemics.
With the state of our global media and communication channels, the incentive models definitely create strange emergent behavior. This is an important frame to use to understand what is happening in the world through our Internet and economic algorithms and figure out a strategy to prevent detrimental events and incidents. Oftentimes, these vulnerabilities are beyond design-basis.