[books] First Chapter of Emergence by Steven Johnson… [via kottke.org]

‘…they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent “executive branch.” They are bottom-up systems, not top-down. They get their smarts from below. In a more technical language, they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior. In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence.’

First Chapter of Emergence by Steven Johnson

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2001 at 10:34 am and is filed under Books.

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