Antifragility

Antifragility is a concept popularized by Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and a term he coined in his book, Antifragile. Antifragility refers to systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. As Taleb explains in his book, antifragility is fundamentally different from the concepts of resiliency (i.e. the ability to recover from failure) and robustness (that is, the ability to resist failure).

Taleb defines it as follows:

Antifragile vs. robust/resilient
In his book, Taleb stresses the differences between antifragile and robust/resilient. "Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better."

Antifragile vs. adaptive/cognitive
An adaptive system is one that changes its behavior based on information available at time of utilization (as oppose to having the behavior defined during system design). This characteristic is sometimes referred to as cognitive. While adaptive systems allow for robustness under a variety of scenarios (often unknown during system design), they are not necessarily antifragile. In other words, the difference between antifragile and adaptive is the different between a system that robust under volatile environments/conditions, and one that is robust in an previously unknown environment.