The Wright Brothers and Hierarchical Design
Introduction
Design and verification of token-based products is not easy. But we can leverage strategies from other fields to make our lives easier. Divide-and-conquer aka “hierarchical design” is one such strategy. The idea is to decompose the design into sub-components, then design & verify each subcomponent separately.
My favorite example is how the Wright brothers developed the airplane.
Here are their four main sub-problems, and how they approached each.
I. Control
How do you control the airplane? Unlike contemporaries, the brothers saw this as the key problem to solve. The insight was: a kite is like an airplane, except its propulsion system is simply the wind (!).
To verify their designs, they flew on kites at Kitty Hawk. They tried several different designs to have on-chain (whups, on-kite) control, until they arrived at “wing warping”.
II. Wing shape
Several theorists had fancy math and tables describing how different shapes should perform. While the brothers revered those theorists, after preliminary tests the brothers realized that these tables were useless. Trust, but verify. To design and verify their designs, they developed a freakin’ wind tunnel in their bicycle shop! It was easily the most advanced wind tunnel of its time. Along the way, they invented instruments to measure lift and drag.
III. Drive system
How do you design a motor or engine with a sufficiently high power-to-weight ratio to propel an airplane? Other plane builders were trying steam engines, but those were too heavy.
The brothers chose internal combustion. They found that no engines on the market met their needs, so they developed their own, with the help of a genius mechanic friend.
IV. Propeller
Similar to the drive system, the brothers had to develop their own propeller to meet their needs.
All Together
Only once each of these sub-blocks was designed and verified did the brothers assemble the final plane and verify it.
“The Wright brothers’ use of a shrewd and ruthless functional decomposition, facetwise modeling, and well-planned experiments and dimensional analysis enabled them to get to flight when so many others had failed” -David Goldberg
Divide-and-conquer approaches are used across many engineering disciplines, from electrical engineering to software engineering to AI.
Conclusion
The Wright Brothers are a wonderful example of how divide-and-conquer (aka Hierarchical Design) helps to reduce complexity in engineering design.
Related Media
- This biography of the Wright Brothers by David McCullough is excellent, and served as the primary reference for my writing above.
- This article on hierarchical design links to a related video and a related academic paper.
- This post is a precursor to Ocean V3 work. Here’s all V3 posts: “Ocean Protocol V3 Posts: Links to all V3-Related Stories” [link] [added Sep 7, 2020]
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