Luck is the residue of design.
–Branch Rickey
After an Dr. Dobb’s interview with Christos Papadimitriou I have been thinking about design, creation, and development of complex systems. Specifically systems that are fundamentally efficient. The most important systems in existence are all amazingly complex (in fact, entirely too complex to ever design) and yet are built (often upon very simply concepts.) They evolve into existence and are created without ever being engineered.
My favorite example is economics, which has as its basis very simple rules. Economics sprout markets; which which are not only insanely complex but suffer from constant attempts to control always with perfect failure. Other example include physics and the universe, computers and the internet.
So my question is, what other systems exist that can be created, but cannot be designed?