November 2008
3 posts
“not because he wanted to - you understand - but just to annoy me. Just to show...”
– Trainspotting
Emergence = “unforeseen occurrence.”
A classic example of emergence lies in the flocking behavior of birds. A computer simulation can use as few as three simple rules (along the lines of “don’t run into each other”) and suddenly you get very complex behavior as the flock wends and wafts its way gracefully through the sky, reforming around obstacles, and so on. None of this advanced behavior (such as reforming the same shape around an...