Emergence
Penguin Books 2002, [buy]- Summary
- This books describes how simple instructions for different kinds of (living) things can evolve in such way, that we can think of "intelligent" behavior when investigating on a higher level, which is called emergence. In the case of ants this would not be a single ant investigated separately, but the whole colony during its whole life cycle.
See also the very interesting article in ubiquity: The Rise of the Intelligent Enterprise [pdf, 54kB]
Further Information
- llk.media.mit.edu/projects/emergence/
- This site is an interactive lesson (active essay) about emergence. It's
very descriptive because as a reader you can interact with the
demonstrations - via Java Applets - to get a thorough
understanding of the topics presented.
Furthermore the pages are perfectly adapted for web presentations.
- education.mit.edu/starlogo
- StarLogo is a programmable modeling environment for exploring the workings of decentralized systems -- systems that are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. With StarLogo, you can model (and gain insights into) many real-life phenomena, such as bird flocks, traffic jams, ant colonies, and market economies.
- www.t0.or.at/delanda/
- Further information and an Interview with Manuel de Landa (citied in this book).
- http://emergence.org/
- Emergence publishes articles of a qualitative nature relating
complex systems, sensemaking, psychology, philosophy,
semiotics, and cognitive science to the management of
organizations both public and private.
The readers of Emergence are managers, academics, consultants, and others interested in the possibility of applying the insights of the science of complex systems to day-to-day management and leadership problems.
Emergence is a publication of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence. Emergence is published electronically by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Inc.
Interface Culture
Harper San Francisco 1997, [buy]- Summary
- in progress