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Tuesday, 25 October 2011

Studying Emergence

Our restatement of Steven Johnson's "five fundamental principles" (pp 77-79) as tips for modelling self-organising systems are:
  • More examples are better: Studying a few ants will never lead to an understanding of the global behaviour of the colony.
  • Low-level ignorance is useful: Lose a few ants and it doesn't make much difference.
  • Notice how the system responds to random encounters: Individual ants will stumble across a new resource which increases the adaptiveness of the whole (and reduces the possibility of getting stuck on a 'false peak').
  • Notice the patterns in the signs: Ants respond the the frequency of ant encounters and the gradient of pheromone trails, not to messages from individual ants.
  • Components pay most attention to their neighbours: In this way swarm logic leads to global wisdom.
Johnson's other "four core principles" are "neighbour interaction, pattern recognition, feedback, and indirect control."  (p. 22)


http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/194/1/What-is-Emergence/Page1.html




It should be noted that some of the language could be interpreted to  evoke the scientific "gaze"

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