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Emergence is the process of deriving some new and coherent structures, patterns and properties in a complex system. Emergent phenomena occur due to the pattern of interactions between the elements of a system over time. Emergent phenomena are often unexpected, nontrivial results of relatively simple interactions of relatively simple components. What distinguishes a complex system from a merely complicated one is that some behaviours and patterns emerge in complex systems as a result of the patterns of relationship between the elements.
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2 Emergent systems 3 See also 4 Bibliography 5 External links |
An emergent behaviour or emergent property is shown when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective.
A system made of several things can host properties which the things themselves do not have. For instance, consider two points on a plane. These points will have a distance between them. This distance is not itself a property, but exists in the relation between the points. Emergent properties can arise not only between things in the system, but between other emergent properties. The number and subtlety of these properties can be very much greater than the number of things.
The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities.
The shape and behaviour of a flock of birds or school of fish are readily understandable examples, and it is typical that the mechanisms governing the flock or school are harder to grasp than the behaviour of individual birds or fish.
This helps to explain why, for instance, the number of ways of packing boxes into a truck increases exponentially with the number of boxes and why the fallacy of division is a fallacy. According to an emergent perspective, intelligence emerges from the connections between neurons, and from this perspective it is not necessary to propose a "soul" to account for the fact that brains can be intelligent, even though the individual neurons of which they are made are not.
Emergent processes or behaviours can be seen in a lot of places, from any multicellular biological organism to traffic patterns or organizational phenomena to computer simulations. The stock market is an example of emergence on a grand scale. As a whole it precisely regulates the relative prices of companies across the world, yet it has no leader; there is no one entity which controls the workings of the entire market. Each agent, or investor, has knowledge of only a limited number of companies within their portfolio, and must follow the regulatory rules of the market. Through the interactions of individual investors the complexity of the stock market as a whole emerges.
The study of emergent behaviours is not generally considered a homogeneous field, but divided across its application or problem domains.
Emergent properties
Emergent systems
See also
Bibliography
External links