DECAY
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(1) |
| ID | ◀ 821 ▶ |
| Object type | General information, Human sciences |
The progressive degradation, disorganization of a system.
Decay is generally due to a non-compensated negative feedback, which progressively dampens the resilience of the system, i.e. its capacity to adaptively fluctuate within a not too narrow band of values or situations.
It also can result of the depletion of critical elements in the system.
Decay is somehow associated with ageing in living systems and also with clogging by excessive accumulation of some types of elements or residues, which poisons the system.
It is also related to the progressive loss of redundancy, and saturation of information channels in social systems.
In interactive parallel processing networks , decay refers to a decrease of activity in the network , i.e. a decrease of the number of activation events in function of time .