I seem to have developed a penchant for popular science books over the last six months, and now find my Borders browsing habits have been slightly tipped in favour of the top floor. The latest of these is “Emergence - The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software” by Steven Johnson.

I’ve been interested in emergence for a long while - its one of the main reasons that I wanted to create a test-bed to play around with simple emergent systems like flocking (resulting in Hippo Lake). I think some simulated emergent phenomena are the closest that computer systems come to approaching magic - even the very simple such as Conways Game of Life. Perhaps part of the appeal is that you don’t need to write a lot of code to generate something complex and interesting - get the right rule set and parameters and let it go. That said, coming up with the right rules and parameters is not necessarily at all easy.

Some aspects of the subjects have done my head in for a bit. For some reason my mind could not accept the absence of “pacemakers” within an emergent system - as Johnson mentions in the book the mind seems to have a significant bias towards top-down heirarchical explanations for events than bottom up emergent explanations. This book, however, provides an excellent introduction to the subject, covering a lot of material clearly and easily with some great examples.

The book is split into three sections. The first is an introduction to emergence, and examples of emergence in our everyday lives. The second is a look at how we’ve attempted to understand emergence and to lever its strengths, and the final part looks at how people are crafting new emergent systems from scratch. Some of the examples really do make you think about things with a different perspective - such as the behaviour and organisation of online communities such as Slashdot.

Highly recommended.

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