Emergent Behavior

Full Title or Meme

Emergent Behavior refers to the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.

Context

The behavior of a complex system might be considered emergent if it can’t be predicted from the properties of the parts alone.

• Emergent Behavior refers to the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence refers to the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. It is also the most striking feature of Self-organization.
• Emergent properties are those that are not present in the individual components of a system but arise from their interactions
• Emergence lives in the place between dependance and autonomy, between predictable and random. It tries to explicate the dualism of the world, which extends even to the dualism of Quantum Mechanics where the fundamental parts are neither waves that travel through space or particles that are observed as events, but rather show the behaviors of both.
• Historically we can track the idea that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts to Plato but the first use of the term emergent is in George Lewes

  Although each effect is the resultant of its components, we cannot always trace the steps of the process, so as to see in the product the mode of operation of each factor. In the latter case, we propose to call the effect an emergent. It arises out of the combined agencies, but in a form which does not display the agents in action … Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the cooperant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same – their difference when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable … It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a cooperation of things of unlike kinds … The emergent is unlike its components in so far as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference.

Problem

• Many parts of our world, perhaps even the entire universe, seem to be too complex given the very simple rules that the elemental parts' behavior could not possibly predict.
• One does not need to understand Quantum Mechanics to describe a tornado or attempt to predict its path.
• Identity Models are constructed to describe complex Ecosystems that have component parts that are constantly changing, yet the identifier of the living organisms in an Ecosystem can have Identifiers that work well for years or even eons.
• Everything is in flux. Hericlitus staid: "You cannot step twice into the same river, for it is not the same river and you are not the same person." Or by another translation: "Into the same steams on those stepping in, different things and different waters flow." Each river is, in some sense, the same river, but always different, always emerging into some other Identity, but with the same Identifier.

Solution

Scientists and Philosophers have been trying to analyze and categorize Emergent Behavior for a long time with the only result being the realization that we do not have the models or even the frameworks to build models that help us to understand. Finally from the chaos an idea of a framework is emerging (self-reference intended.)

• A framework has been proposed to enable a deeper understanding of the multi-level structure of complex systems, revealing specific ways in which they can be efficiently simulated, predicted, and controlled.

  [The authors] articulate a view on emergence based on how software works, which is rooted on a mathematical formalism that articulates how macroscopic processes can express self-contained informational, interventional, and computational properties. This framework establishes a hierarchy of nested self-contained processes that determines what computations take place at what level, which in turn delineates the functional architecture of a complex system. This approach is illustrated on paradigmatic models from the statistical physics and computational neuroscience literature, which are shown to exhibit macroscopic processes that are akin to software in human-engineered systems.

• For biological ecosystems an Emergent Behavior arises from evolution. Once an organism is born, it will have some genetically determined behaviors at birth. After birth it will learn new behaviors to match the environment where it lives.
• For Artificial Intelligence or other complex computer systems, an Emergent Behavior is one that was not expected during the programing of the system.

Physics and Computing

• Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. Within assemblies of organisms that seem as though they could get chaotic, order somehow emerges. The collective behaviors of animals differ in their details from one species to another, but they largely adhere to principles of collective motion that physicists have worked out over centuries. Now, using technologies that only recently became available, researchers have been able to study these patterns of behavior more closely than ever before.