Slashdot Mirror
Emergence
This book covers the theory of emergence, which states that within a system of what seems to be anarchy, there are underlying rules that govern the pattern of behaviour and bring order out of chaos.
This books serves as an introduction to the field of emergence. It is something that is already happening around us, but we usually cannot see. The reason for this is that you need to look at a higher level then the individual organism. Ants can not see the society as a whole that they are members of. Just as we humans may have an understanding of the local community we are in and of ourselves, we need to step outside (or above) the city to understand how it functions. A city, like an ant colony does not have rules from the top as such, but rules that each occupant obeys, and it is these rules that give order to the chaos and make the resultant community behave like an organism as a whole.
I really wanted to like this book. But the level of information within it will make me put in into the light, popular fiction section of my bookshelf. One of the aspects of the book that really wanted me to give a good review is that the author makes a good introduction to the theory behind the comments system of Slashdot, the way people are chosen to rate comments and how good comments filter to the top. As such, I would have liked a review of the editorial process on Kuro5hin as well, since the two systems as fairly similar. In fact, I think the Kuro5hin system is better, because long time readers will see that the stories have moved away from an open source/linux focus to more cultural aspects, thus reflecting the change and growth of the community. But the idea of a Daily Me portal, that serves information that would suit us is explored heavily.
As I read the book though, an uneasiness came upon me, just as I do when reading books on neo-Darwinism. There is no mention of where these rules as such come from except through evolutionary survival or initial chance. If anything, the author implies that we are in a universe that had the initial conditions set, and left running. So we'd evolve or grow into who or what we are.
The idea that a God figure could be there, tweaking the parameters as the model runs, or even setting the initial conditions works against his ideas. This view is however explored in the chapter Control Artist, where the author comments on the development of software models, notably computer games. Games such as SimCity are discussed where the rules are set, but as a player we get to choose what gets built, what gets destroyed. Although here we are playing the Mayor of the City, the notion is the same; we control the macro level and not the micro level. But at the micro level, the software developer who built the game in the first place controls each inhabitant. Nothing really, is left to chance. Given the exact same initial conditions and same set of instructions the computer will create the same environment.
So, like most popular science books currently available it will educate you, entertain you and keep you occupied while reading it or totally bore you. But it is not a book of philosophy to base life on, which thankfully, the author has not tried to provide. It is very well researched, and the author seems on top of current trends and ideas. His writing style jumps around quite a bit, and some of the connections between topics might seem a little far fetched but it is an entertaining read as an introduction to the field of emergence theory.
Pet peeve 1: Notes. The notes section at the end is fairly extensive. But there are no foot notes in the book. The notes are indexed by page and quote. So as a reader you have to constantly check the notes section to see if there is a note or reference for the page you are reading.
Pet peeve 2: There was (for me) a glaring technical error on page 120.
"Ironically, it is precisely this feedback that the Web lacks, because HTML-based links are one-directional. You can point to ten other sites from your home page, but there's no way for those pages to know that you're pointing to them, short of you taking the time to fire off an e-mail to their respective webmasters."You can see who is visiting your site, unless they are using an anonymizer proxy, or other system to hide your headers. The HTTP-REFERER header gives you exactly this information.
You can purchase Emergence at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the book review guidelines first, then use the web submissions form.
not that the links actually exist. A link is, in fact, one directional. If no one follows a link, there is no way to know that it exists. Practically, looking at the referrers (or should I say 'referers' to use the official but wrong spelling) of your HTTP requests will tell you pretty much the same thing, but there's a conceptual difference between that and actually having some sort of "reverse-link". Kind of like asking everyone who comes into your store where they heard about you as opposed to hearing first hand from the people making the recommendations.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
You can see who is visiting your site, unless they are using an anonymizer proxy, or other system to hide your headers.
If no one clicks on the link to get to the page, you will never know the link exists. Do those links matter? Probably not.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
You can see who is visiting your site, unless they are using an anonymizer proxy, or other system to hide your headers. The HTTP-REFERRER header gives you exactly this information.
Technically this is not true. The HTTP-REFERRER only shows you who sends people to your site by a link, not who links to it. Just because you can tell where someone came from doesn't change the structure of a link. The link its self is truly one way.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
I've read materials somewhat akin to this in the past, and they all seem to boil down to the "if you stand back far enough, it looks like order..." argument. But they always seem to overlook that inescapable fact of probability - if you look at ANYTHING on a large enough scale, you'll begin to see some order. Kind of like the "infinite monkeys/infinite typewriters" adage. That is, if you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters, at least one of those monkeys is going to type the complete works of Shakespeare. Sounds stupid at first, but in reality, it's absolutely true. Infinite scope leads to infinite odds in favor of what you're looking for (or not looking for).
By the way, did anyone else notice that this review sounded more like a school book report than an actual review? The guy who submitted spent an awful lot of time pointing out stupid "technical errors" (they weren't errors, by the way) to really lend any plausibility to his review. Just a thought.
You can hardly blame the author for writing a popular science text that fails to include wild speculation about the influence of medieval superstition on physical phenomena. I imagine he probably failed to consider phlogiston and the luminiferous ether, too, but I would have a hard time holding that against him either.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Er, interesting review.
I googled and filtered, an intro to Emergence the notion, and an excerpt from Emergence the book. (In which Slashdot is discussed.)
Oh, and here's a less interesting book review of Emergence from the Village Voice.
Like the reviewer I wanted to like this, and it does manage to serve as a passable overview of evolution in complex systems, but only in the same way as "A Brief History of Time" serves as a passable introduction to cosmology.
The primary problem is that rather than being a popular science book, it comes accross as a populist one, picking easy pop-culture references rather than more appropriate ones. This would be more forgivable if the book was giving a more balanced view of the subject, but the author seems to have a definate agenda which he is trying to communicate rather than giving a solid, unbiased view of the topic.
A good book on the subject for people who have no knowledge of, or interest in, the topic.
I see a review for this book every few weeks on any number of sites: slashdot, wired, plastic, feed, etc. It seems like whenever there is a slow news day, someone out there writes a review for this book.
I read this book hoping to gain an intuitive sense for the concepts of emergence, other than the obvious 'individual agents acting according to a similar set of rules to achieve something larger.' Unfortunately, as the reviewer already pointed out, this book was basically fluff.
I learned the following things from this book:
1) ant colonies are cool
2) the republicans are evil
3) gay bashing is bad
This book is good for those who know absoloutly nothing of emergence, complex adaptive systems, etc.
Steven Johnson? this is the same guy responsible for Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, a book i've had the misfortune to read. Mr Johnson seems to have the Wired Magazine-style flair for making mountains out of molehills, making blind reaches into that which he knows nothing about (i.e. physics), and making an ass out of himself. do yourself a favor and read something smarter (maybe something from the Oprah Book Club?).
(the fact that most of the comments are clarifications on the HTTP-REFERRER discussion seems to suggest that the book might not terribly engaging to the Slashdot audience anyhow.)
Not only are links one way with HTML (excepting the http-referrer info, and this can be forged) but in fact for most site-owners, they themselves don't even know where they are sending people. Without using some database-backed link-tracking bouncer, you as a website designer have no idea who is clicking on what links. The times that this is most useful is for advertising because you are most likely getting paid per-click. Not only is it beyond the scope of most basic homepage authors to do this (or impossible depending on where you host), but also you then have a single point of failure -- when was the last time you clicked on a banner ad link or similiar just to have the script be broken in some way and not actually 403 you to the right site.
Since reading and doing an undergrad seminar on Symmetry in Chaos by Marty Golubitsky and Mike Field several years ago, I've been quite interested in this topic.
A more serious alternative to Emergence might be The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature.
It's not surprising, however, that someone would write something like this. Not only is it rehash, but he never answers the fundamental question of WHY we and the rest of the matter in the universe are here, not HOW we got here.
Just remember - science answers the question HOW, not why.
This idea of emergence seems different than the one I always imagine.
I think of emergence in terms of complex behavior resulting from simple rules (eg. the many kinds of human thought resulting from the interactions of a pile of simple neurons).
I think of emergence in terms of "the whole is greater than its parts" rather than "there's order in chaos".
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop
This is a fascinating read about the development of chaos theory, complexity, and emergent behaviours. Runs the gamut from economics to genetic algorithms to Chem 101 and the evolution of life.
As an undergraduate who was at the time much of the book covers (mid-80's) playing with self-organizing systems in software (WATOR, sharks&fishes, life) and discovering, sort of, some mathematical links between initial configurations that become stable and those that die out -- I feel like I was almost famous! If only I'd not been merely playing around, and getting drunk too much...
I've read several popular items on artificial life, chaos, evolution, etc. All of them delve into this concept of emergence: this notion that totally unexpected - but organized - behavior can result from the complex interactions of very simple rules.
The peculiar thing about emergence, though, is that all these authors and researchers are fascinated by it but nobody seems to have a rigorously measurable definition. Nobody seems to be able to say that "if and only if X and Y happen, then you have emergence."
Has anybody here seen such a definition?
A man without a God is like a fish without a bicycle.
Theologians work for centuries to finely craft their ideas about God.
And the best you can come up with is, 'He's the Mayor from Sim City.'
I hate the fact that scientific papers never say, "God did it. We don't have to bother with this anymore, it's just too complicated."
--Zone Dancer
[sarcasm]
How else can you sue people for accessing your content in 'inappropriate' ways?
If someone came to a deep page without first going through the 'EULA' page, or some other crank..
[/sarcasm]
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Laureate) extended a lot on that matter years ago. I *think* he is one of the first writing about 'emerging properties' of complex systems. Have a look at "Order out of Chaos", or "The End of Certainties", just to name a few... Nevertheless, I think this is one of the most fascinating branch of fundamental research of the last 20 years. This also relates to an article publisher here on Dec 4...
the theories of ilya prigogine. Any relationship between the two?
...to get good karma!.....
I want to be alone with the sandwich
i avoided drawing the similarity lest i get downmodded, but you've got the right idea.
Bioligists discuss it in terms of evolution, physicists talk about it in terms of particle physics and cosmology, sociologists talk about it in terms of city formation and anthropologists in terms of cultural dynamics. But none of them try to explain emergence in and of itself, except for the mathemeticians (and good luck figuring out what the hell they are talking about if you don't have a higher degree in pure math).
As a prior commenter stated, many people *talk* about emergence, and derive emergent principle from their disciplines, but very little effort is made to define what emergence is, how it works, and how to tell the difference between emergence and random noise. In answer to another commenter's question, emergence frequently *is* a matter of scale, random behaviour at one level displays emergent properties at the next level, then reverts to apparent randomness at higher scales, and then can display randomness *again* at the next jump in scale. Emergence is what happens when all the "random" fluctuation happen to cancel each other out in just the right ways to make something definitely non-random happen.
That's why this book is useful, because it examines emergence as a whole concept in plain english, rather than just focusing on a particular example or type of emergence.
--Dave Rickey
I thought about the fact that one could look at the referer data from a web server to make http bi-directional, but I think that for any kind of emergent behaviour to come about, one has to have many individual units all behaving in similar ways, so even if one or two people were to hook in some smart web scripting that looks at, and reports who refered to them, it wouldn't make a difference unless a large critical-mass of individuals did the same thing. So HTML over HTTP in it's present incarnation is not bi-directional for all practical purposes.
The reviewer doesn't seem to like the idea of micro evolution without the intervetion of God,
Could be, but this is a book based on scientific theory, so you can't really blame it for not showing a creationist side of the argument.More than anything, this book made me want to go out and write some cool internet client/server that would do some very simple, known, micro-behaviours but if distributed widly around the internet, and interacting in various ways, they would produce, undefined, Macro Behaviour! That is what Emergence Theory is all about, if I understand it correctly. Same thing that's happening in the brain, Neurons are doing very simple micro-behaviours, but put them into a great big hunk of brain where there are millions of simple units interacting and doing micro-behaviours (fire-nofire) extreamly intelegent and unpredictible Macro-behaviours occur.
This book got me all excited because this was the first time this was explaned to me in a simple way using analogies that I understand, like software, games and even Slashdot! I recomend it, Steve Johnson is also the author of "Infomation Culture" which is apparently a pretty good book too, I havn't read it yet.
yebbNOSPAM@kidojo.com
Sorry but I do not see ants following a chemical trail as being a good example of emergent behavior. What is the higher-level activity resulting from the collective behavior of the lower-level activity? Now Aunt Hillary... she's one emergent Aunt!
I want to be alone with the sandwich
There's another book called Complexity (1992 - M. Mitchell Waldrop (Amazon link)) which is a great early history and overview of the field of complexity and how it was formed (and which emergence is just another name for). Nine years old, but still great reading. Includes the formation of the Sante Fe Institute.
It's hands-down the best post-holocaust SF I have ever read, but it is, incredibly, out of print. If you like this sort of SF, it's worth tracking down a copy.
Unfortunately, the author wrote one more book, "Threshold", and then disappeared entirely. I don't know whether he passed away, ditched writing, or what, but it's a shame.
If you are looking at some additional texts in the area, Dr. John Holland has written two books. (Holland is also a MacArthur award winner, which places him in some fairly good company.)
- Emergence : From Chaos to Order (Helix Books)
- Hidden Order : How Adaptation Builds Complexity
I thought /. reviewed one of the books earlier, but a quick search did not find anything. As I recall, Emergence is the earlier book of the two and is much more technical. Hidden Order is more topical and discusses concepts as opposed to technical details... but it has been a few years since I read either.
Just some info for those who might want another angle on a similar subject.
This is another overblown pitch for a place in the non-fiction book lists and that's all. what a load of crap.
on google's advanced search page you can do a page-specific search for pages that contain links to specific pages.
Jeez, don't geeks read Godel, Escher, Bach anymore? Hofstadter did the ant thing 25 years ago.
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee ...
Or, with equal logic, "it is not a book of programming style and architecture to base applications on, which thankfully, the author has not tried to provide."
What's the point in saying that it isn't something it doesn't claim to be? So you were hoping for support of your personal beliefs and didn't get it? To bad. That isn't a reason to go from saying that the book will educate the reader (in the quote above) to calling it fiction:
I really wanted to like this book. But the level of information within it will make me put in into the light, popular fiction section of my bookshelf.
StartRant:
:EndRant
A belief system must be pretty desperate for support when a science book gets relabeled to fiction, not for an attack, but merely for failing to provided the support the reviewer had hoped for.
If you post, and nobody reads your post, was it really worth posting in the first place?
You can't really know what pages are pointing to you by looking at referral headers.
:)
Referrals only tell you what people came to your site _from_ a said site, not if a link exists or where the link is.
Think about:
- use of a link redirection page by a site (usual in corporate sites, etc)
- links that exist but aren't followed
- people that surf with referrals turned off (lots of software allow this)
The link system is effectively one-way only.
Two-way links were proposed in the original Xanadu system, but no provision exists under the current www scheme. Except, of course, for google...
free the mallocs!
I think you misunderstood the comment. He meant that you only receive information on those links that people follow. A hundred pages could link to your site, but if nobody ever follows those links, you'll never know they exist.
The subject of his message may have been confusing. But if you read the rest of you'll see that he didn't imply that HTTP-REFERER gives you additional information about the person who followed the link, it only provides the URL of the page they came from.
It seems that the review of Emergence has about as much substance as the book itself, collecting random bits from a larger body of work to prove an almost unrelated point. A reviewer who finds the lack of a god figure in a book about emergent behavior unsettling? That is the whole point of complex adaptive systems you idiot! Rich and varied macro behovior arises from simple rules applied at the micro level in a massively parallel fashion.
That is not to say that Emergence is a good book. It is an adequate book to give to a lay reader who is completely unfamiliar with the subject matter so that they can at least understand the basics of emergent behavior. On the whole the book is about at the same level as Kelley's Out of Control, cute but nothing of consequence. Anyone who is really interested in this subject should start with the following list:
Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (Michael Resnick)
Emergence (John Holland)
Hidden Order (John Holland)
At Home in the Universe (Stuart Kaufman)
A Self-Made Tapestry (John Ball)
Swarm Intelligence (Bonobeau et al.)
The Computational Beauty of Nature (Flake)
Anything (and everything you can find) by Dawkins, E.O Wilson, and Hofsteader along with the Artificial Life series from the Sante Fe Institute (preceedings from the conference series of the same name)
This is an interesting and important subject area which most Slashdot readers would be well-served to examine and explore. Unfortunately such exploration is not served well by either this review or the book being reviewed.
I read this book when it first came out and I've been working on a review of it myself. I figured it was an ideal candidate for a review on /. given Steven Johnson's (the author) multiple referrences to /. in the book. It is interesting to note Johnson's background in the context of site many Slashdotters used everyday. Johnson was a founder of now dead community generated content sites Feed Magazine and Plastic, which are very similar to /. in the way they are generated an community maintained. Plastic even uses Slash as its base. I found the sections pertaining to how sites like these work to be very insightful and they'd probably be of interest to anyone who's ever wondered why /. works as well as it does.
Additionally, our reviewer leaves out the parallels between biological emergent systems (slime molds, termites, etc.) and computer systems. Johnson gives an entirely new deconstruction of the 'pacemaker' or 'queen ant' theory in both computer and life systems. Altogether, I think the book is worth the 3 hours it takes to read.
"The Origins of Order" by Stuart Kauffman is an excellent book on this subject. It's pretty heavy reading, plenty of math and experimantal models, with a focus on biology and how the order we see in living systems arises out of chaos.
Those interested in current discussion of various models involving emergence and their specific use (or uselessness) in comprehending consciousness should check out The Emergence of Consciousness - which is the book version of the Sept.-Oct. 2001 issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Robert Van Gulick's overview of different types of emergence which have been theorized is particularly valuable.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
If a page linked to in the world wide web, but nobody clicks on it...Is it still a web page?
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
The principle of emergence is that interestingly
complex behaviors results from simple underlying
phenomena. For example Mandlebrot fractals are a
six line program in FORTRAN. Human mental activity
arises out a trillion elementary nerve cells, etc.
The problem is, this is unpredictable.
By definition science is repeatable experimentals
and observations.
So emergencent phenomena are not predictable until
that happen, and therefore non-scientific.
Another book on the topic that came out probably almost 10 years ago is "Emergent Computation", edited by Stephanie Forrest. It's out of print now, but I believe it was also published as a special issue of the Physica D journal. It was a conference proceedings. (I used to work at the Center for Nonlinear Studies and Santa Fe Institute, and Forrest was also around at the time.)
By the way, people interested in this stuff may be interested in checking out the Swarm simulation system, a multi-agent simulation environment. Some of the demos that come with it are the ant/pheromone models and so on, which e.g. Resnick also explored in StarLogo.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.