Adaptive System
A set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, forming an integrated whole that together are able to respond to environmental changes or changes in the interacting parts, in a way analogous to either continuous physiological homeostasis or evolutionary adaptation in biology.
Origin
The concept grew out of cybernetics, the interdisciplinary science of self-regulating systems pioneered by Norbert Wiener in his 1948 book Cybernetics. British psychiatrist W. Ross Ashby formalized the idea of adaptive systems in his 1952 Design for a Brain, arguing that systems maintaining homeostasis under environmental change do so through negative feedback. The term became central to the field of complex adaptive systems, developed at the Santa Fe Institute from the 1980s onward, which applied the model across biology, economics, and social organization.