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Emergence
The author makes a point that there are 3 main camps of scientific study.
- The study of simple systems - under a few dozen variables, like electromagnetism, or celestial mechanics.
- The study of stochastic systems - few million to few billion variables, like actuarial sciences and genetics.
- The study of disorganized complexity. Systems in the middle between a dozen and a few million variables, where the second order characteristics - how they interact, is of primary concern.
Deduction and induction work for the first two camps, but for the third, the interactions cause actions and reactions which are what scientists politely call counter intuitive, meaning your first thought is Huh? Or, in other words, it behaves quite differently from what your instincts and (so-called) common sense would tell you.
There are five basic principles for developing a system (or simulation of one) which can express emergent behavior:
- More is different. You get a very different behavior of the system when certain thresholds are reached.
- Ignorance is useful. Ants communicate with a vocabulary of around 20 words/ideas.
- Encourage random encounters. Much of the behavior of an ant colony comes from them just bumping into each other (or external things like food, or my foot).
- Look for patterns in the signs. Even with the limited vocabulary of ants, they can also express things based on the decay in the pheromones they deposit.
- Pay attention to your neighbors. Also described as "local information can lead to global wisdom."
One of the enduring myths we have, is that of the Ant Queen. The myth supposes that there is some central planning done in an ant colony. Instead, the queen exists only to pop eggs out. Male ants have such short lives, that in most species of ants, they have no mouths to eat with; they just don't live long enough to get hungry. The production of warriors and workers is stimulated by pheromones in the colony. Information on where to gather food is gathered through random acts of bumping into things. There is no ant which tells another to go lift that bale or tote that barge. It appears that our intelligence is a by-product of the neural interactions of our brains.
The economist Jane Jacobs had been studying things like this for years, and has been demonized by the majority of economists: they want to believe in some centralized controlling force, control that force, and you control the development of your economic system. People reading her books tend to think she worships sidewalks, instead, she values the communication that can only happen on sidewalks; people meeting each other and exchanging words. You can't say "hi" to your neighbors if you are each zipping past each other on the freeway.
One can experiment with emergent behavior with some software tools. The author explains a few, of which you are most likely to have experience with SimCity.
The main difference between chaos theory and emergent behavior theory lies in a couple important differences. A chaotic system has a number of determinable feedback loops, all of which are (usually critically) dependent upon the starting conditions. Emergent behavior has more to do with feedback loops causing totally different behavior, and when some threshold (usually population) is passed, the nature of the system drastically changes.
If you are looking for sample code to simulate things, you won't find it in this book. If, however, you want to get an overview of where this field is coming from, read this book.
You can purchase Emergence: the Connected lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I live in the country, and we have no sidewalks here. If you don't own a car, you might as well be living on a deserted island. Luckily computer games make that life bearable.
God spoke to me.
Take the case of Tibet. Why do the folks in Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan province support integrating Tibet into "One China"? Why are engineering classes overflowing with Chinese folks and Amnesty International meetings being nearly devoid of Chinese?
What is the name of this Chinese emergence? It is "Chinese culture". The god of Chinese culture is Chinese nationalism. Visit the link about Taiwan. It has been updated within the last 24 hours, and there is an interesting statistic (courtesy of "The New York Times"): 1 million Taiwanese (about 4.3% of Taiwan's population) have emigrated mainland China. Of course, the Taiwanese are responsible for their behavior even though we can ascribe it to "emergence". (I know. I know. I was shocked by the statistic too, and I have a Ph.D. in Political Science.) The Taiwanese are responsible for insisting, via their constitution, that Tibet is part of "One China".
The Taiwanese, the Hong Kongers, and the mainlanders all do not give a damn about Tibet.
Sigh. I wish sometimes that you American would understand one simple thing about China. China has a veeeeeeery long historical memory, going back 4000 years. The US has a history going back, what? 350 years? China has had the rather interesting thing that, despite differences in language everyone in the country could read the script for more than a thousand years. It has had an interesting unifying force on the country and the Chinese sens of history simply goed back waaaaay longer.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
The "historical memory" to which the Chinese refer is bigotry, taught from one generation to the next. Bigotry is popular and fun in Chinese society.
Americans, like other Westerners, explicitly reject "historical memory". We know that bigotry is not fun; it is wrong.
Chinese are VERY different from Westerners. What else is new, besides the 4 additional Tibetans rounded up and tortured by the Chinese this month?
In what other country is it common to refer to foreigners as "white devils" or "black devils" or just "foreign devils".
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.