Emergence: the connected lives of ants, cities, and software

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Steven Johnson

Emergence: the connected lives of ants, cities, and software

Value of multidisciplinary work:

  • To see a pattern, you must encounter it in several contexts (p.18)

Emergence: the movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication

Complex behavior: a system with multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways, following local rules, and obliivious to any higher-level instructions

  • Emergence occures when there is a discernible macrobehavior
  • Without adaptation, emergent complexity is a beautiful pattern like a snowflake (p. 20)

Big question: How do you make a self-organizing system more adaptive?

  • Phase 1: initial struggles underestimated complexity of self-organization
  • Phase 2: interdisciplinary approaches, comparative studies, pursuit of common features
  • Phase 3: developing artificial emergence like Amazon recommendations
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