# The Sciences of the Artificial

Source: https://dinand.com/reading-notes/the-sciences-of-the-artificial/
Author: Dinand Tinholt

> Herbert Simon’s ant on the beach, and where an agent’s complicated behaviour comes from.

![Close-up of a red bull ant walking across coarse, uneven sand.](https://dinand.com/assets/reading-notes/the-sciences-of-the-artificial.jpg)

*A bull ant on a sandy fire trail in Myall Lakes National Park, Australia. Simon’s point: most of the path belongs to the beach.Image: “Red Bull Ant Sand” by Quartl, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_Bull_Ant_Sand.JPG), licensed under [CC BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0). Resized for this page.*

Herbert Simon published The Sciences of the Artificial in 1969. He had already helped found the field of artificial intelligence, and he went on to win the Nobel prize in economics in 1978. Few people have felt equally at home in both worlds.

The book has a famous small scene. An ant crosses a beach toward its nest, and its path twists around pebbles and ripples in the sand. Sketch the path and it looks complicated. Simon’s point is that the ant is simple. Most of the complexity in the path belongs to the beach.

## Look at the beach first

When an AI agent behaves erratically in a business process, teams usually blame the model and start rewriting prompts. Simon would look at the environment first, at the half-documented systems the agent touches and the exceptions nobody ever listed.

He also coined satisficing: settling on the first option good enough for the need. Agents told to find the best answer will burn budget hunting for perfection a person would have accepted ten steps earlier, unless someone writes the bar into the instructions.

Continue the thread

## A next room to enter.

[Choose another path ](https://dinand.com/)

[Reading Notes · Reading note

### On Exactitude in Science

Borges’s one-paragraph story about a map the size of the empire it describes.

](https://dinand.com/reading-notes/on-exactitude-in-science/)[Reading Notes · Reading note

### Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo describes fifty-five cities to Kublai Khan, and each of them is partly Venice.

](https://dinand.com/reading-notes/invisible-cities/)[Reading Notes · Reading note

### The Theory of the Leisure Class

Thorstein Veblen, 1899, and the hand-made spoon that costs more because someone made it slowly.

](https://dinand.com/reading-notes/the-theory-of-the-leisure-class/)

[All Reading Notes ](https://dinand.com/reading-notes/)[Back home ](https://dinand.com/)

---
Site guide for AI agents: https://dinand.com/llms.txt