Emergence

I have earlier recommended Out of Control by Kevin Kelly (available online), which is about artificial systems that mimic things in the “real” world (for example beehives). I ran across a reference to Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software by Steven Johnsson, which seems to be on the same topic and Amazon lists a number of similar books, like Swarm Intelligence, Digital Biology, etc.

In an interview with Steven Johnson, he says that emergence “is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts … when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts [that interact, and] somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears”.

Today, I read an interesting article at News.com, about how British Telecom develops cellphone base stations influenced by how the fruit fly grows it’s exoskeleton. The base station antennas communicate their state to other antennas instead of having some central entity determine the optimal configuration and broadcast it.

The interesting thing is that these simple-minded components don’t use “AI”, but follow simple rules regarding their function and their interactions with peers. The behavior of each of them is comprehensible, not cryptic. The system they form seems to be intelligent, and may exhibit high levels of complexity – but the fact that its parts are comprehensible makes the system more comprehensible.

I think there’s a lesson to be learned here for anyone who is developing systems.

Update: I realized the link above to Out of Control was for another book, so I fixed it.