Designing emergent systems
I’ve blogged a fair amount about emergent systems over the past little while (and the last couple of bits of work have evolved emergence in some way), but one of the ongoing projects that I’m working on has involved something I’ve not had to do before - designing a new emergent system from scratch.
Most emergent phenomena that I’ve played with have been those that have already been explored and and explained by big minds over the past 30 years, so I’ve never dug that deep into the process of attempting to build rules that will lead to a specific behaviour. In this case, however, I had a system of a number of elements with no overall “system awareness” and I needed to find a set of rules for the elements within the system so that specific patterns would emerge if they followed these rules over a number of steps.
Most work of this nature that I’ve done before has been top-down analysis - take a holistic view of the problem and break it down into smaller problems and iterate. When you are designing an emergent system, however, you obviously need to take an entirely bottom-up approach, and think through the eyes of the elements themselves. This isn’t too hard if you are trying to create a simple pattern, but if you are trying to create a number of different behaviours or phenomena simultaneously, you will need a number of different rules, and these rules may well clash. While the outcome will almost certainly be interesting, it can take a lot of balacing to get to the desired outcome.
During the process of designing, tweaking and playing with a variety of systems, I realised how much fun it is to just create and muck around with these things. The unexpected outcomes and occasionally thrilling results are very much worth the effort. I’d not really thought about creating new, imaginary systems before (as opposed to studying and copying natural phenomena) - but its definitely something I hope to do more of in the future.
links for 2007-12-07 (Leapfroglog) on December 7th, 2007
[...] handcircus » Blog Archive » Designing emergent systems “When you are designing an emergent system, … you … need to take an entirely bottom-up approach, and think through the eyes of the elements themselves.” Oldish post from Simon Oliver on the challenges of designing complex emergent systems. (tags: complexity emergence systems design bottomup topdown iterative) [...]