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Emergence - Steven Johnson

Description: ISBN 0140287752 / Author: Steven Johnson / Genre: Science / Nature / We have only recently begun to recognize it, yet it exists at every ... more

Emergence - Steven Johnson ... level of our lived experience. It is fast becoming clear that our lives revolve around the powers of emergence. An ant colony behaves with an intelligence no particular ant possesses; a brain is conscious although no particular brain cell is; a city develops districts and neighbourhoods no planner could impose. In each case, complex problems are solved by a profusion of relatively simple elements.

Newest Review: ... by instinct. An ant follows a few simple rules: get food, dump waste, tend young, defend the colony. It has limited means of ... more

... communications with its fellow ants, and what there is largely based on pheromone signalling. But when thousands of ants interact with each other, what you get is not teeming chaos but a global behaviour that can solve problems, keep the colony fed, protect it from attack and can adapt to a changing environment. This is what emergence is all about, this qualitative difference between the simple rules of the agent and the complex behaviour of the mass. Slime moulds, a favourite example of Johnson's, exhibit e...more

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Emergence - Steven Johnson: Slime, slime, glorious slime (571 words)
by pan - written on 27/02/02 (Very useful, 57 readings)
Rating:

What do ant colonies, slime moulds and the teeming streets of your average city have in common? Viewed through the lens of complexity theory, they are all examples of complex adaptive systems, and a hall-mark of such systems is that they display emergent behaviour. Steven Johnson’s book does not dwell too much on detailing complexity theory to any great extent, there are other books (such as Mitchell Waldrop’s ‘Complexity’ - which I've already reviewed here on dooyoo), instead Johnson is more interested in the real examples of emergence all around us. Emergent phenomena, such as the cleaving of a city into different neighbourhoods or ...

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