Emergence

1
Emergence

• A Bottom-up View of the World

2
Definition Emergence

• Emergence a higher-level pattern arising out of
  parallel complex interactions between local
  agents.
• Keys
• No higher level intelligence or leader directing
  the group
• Behavior is adaptive

3
Slime Molds

• Found on the bark of trees
• Normally independent
• Under certain conditions
• Move together as a group
• Avoid danger
• Move toward food sources
• Demonstrates emergent behavior
• No leader directing the group
• Adaptive behaves in a way that facilitates
  survival

4
The Myth of the Ant Queen

• The queen ant is commonly misunderstood to be the
  leader or director of a colony
• Without a leader, worker ants act and behave in
  an organized, patterned way
• Finding the most efficient route to food sources
• Self-organizing numbers so just the right amount
  of ants handle food, protection, waste removal,
  etc.
• How?
• Pheromone trails
• Each ant leaves a trail, and the other ants upon
  detection act accordingly

5
Common Themes

• Feedback
• Slashdot.org
• Started out as a small web community
• As it grew, spammers and trollers emerged making
  it difficult to weed out good information

6
Common Themes(cont)

• Solution Potential Lieutenants
• Registered users are randomly picked as
  lieutenants
• As a lieutenant, the user can rate comments 1-5
  only a limited number of points may be given out,
  then the user loses lieutenant status
• Better ratings on a users comments gives a
  greater chance of that person being picked as a
  lieutenant
• Perpetuates competent raters and comments
• Allows visitors to filter useless comments
• Show comments with a rating 4 or higher
• Show comments with a rating 3 or higher
• Etc.

7
Common Themes(cont)

• Control Artist
• Mitch Resnick and StarLogo
• Demonstrates slime mold cell behavior
• Programmer is not directly in control
• Shift in view of a computer programmer
• Programmers are thought to be in pure control of
  a program
• Future may be where programmers enter set
  parameters and indicate problem to be solved, and
  the program will do the rest

8
Consequences

• New way of thinking about problems
• NP Complete(Traveling Salesman)
• New way of programming
• Evolutionary software
• Biology
• Help in explaining
• DNA similarities
• How firing neurons mind