On Oct 10, 2009, at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes wrote:
What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or
not? What useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge?
In other areas of my life, classification can have actionable
consequences. For example, I can use the sophisticated pattern-
matching algorithms and heuristics embedded in my brain to work out
that the three animals wandering through my house can be categorized
as "cats" and not "dogs". And that is useful, because it tells me
that I should buy cat food and not dog food when I go to PetCo.
So what is an equivalent example with emergence? Once I've attached
the "emergent" label to a phenomenon, then what?
-- Robert
My interest is pretty theoretical. I'd like to reduce it to some sort
of formal setting, like computer science does with its three classes
of computing devices (FSA, Pushdown Automata, TM), then see if I could
discover simple properties of "complex" systems, emergence among them.
As an example: Emergence could be a computational complexity class ..
one that has has no "short cut" towards "solving" it. Game of Life is
often used as such an environment. It has several trivial initial
conditions that are pre-computable .. i.e. you can analyze the system
and predict the result before running it. But this is not true in
general. Finding the conditions separating the two would be useful.
A similar thing happened to me at Sun: we were trying to build an
event distribution scheme for an early window system that would work
well in a multi-tasking environment (unix). It was really slow. One
of our team spent time resolved that its computational class was non-
polynomial. We started over.
I hate to say it but as much as I despise the flower child
philosophic, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of the book. The
difficulty is the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor.
-- Owen
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