Antifragility is a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.
The concept was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Antifragile, and in technical papers.
The concept has been applied in risk analysis,[3][4] physics,[5] molecular biology,[6][7] transportation planning,[8][9] engineering,[10][11][12] aerospace (NASA),[13] and computer science.
[11][14][15][16] Taleb defines it as follows in a letter to Nature responding to an earlier review of his book in that journal: Simply, antifragility is defined as a convex response to a stressor or source of harm (for some range of variation), leading to a positive sensitivity to increase in volatility (or variability, stress, dispersion of outcomes, or uncertainty, what is grouped under the designation "disorder cluster").
The relation between fragility, convexity, and sensitivity to disorder is mathematical, obtained by theorem, not derived from empirical data mining or some historical narrative.
This work reformulates and builds upon the concept of resilience in a way that is mathematically conveyed and can be heuristically evaluated in real-world applications: for example, ecosystem antifragility.
The authors also propose that for socio-ecosystem governance, planning or in general, any decision making perspective, antifragility might be a valuable and more desirable goal to achieve than a resilience aspiration.
The concept has been applied in business and management,[20] physics,[5] risk analysis,[4][21] molecular biology,[7][22] transportation planning,[8][23] urban planning,[24][25][26] engineering,[11][12][10] aerospace (NASA),[13] computer science,[11][14][15][16][27], water system design,[28] and cancer.
[29][30] In computer science, there is a structured proposal for an "Antifragile Software Manifesto", to react to traditional system designs.
[31] The major idea is to develop antifragility by design, building a system which improves from environment's input.