Emergence
Subtitle: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
Publisher: Scribner
Published: August 28, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780684868752
Subjects: Cybernetics & systems theory; Systems engineering; Science/Mathematics; System Theory; Science; Swarm intelligence; Self-organizing systems; Internet - General; Sociology - Urban; Science / System Theory; Information Theory; Computers; General; Cybernetics; Intellect
First sentence: It's early fall in Palo Alto, and Deborah Gordon and I are sitting in her office in Stanford's Gilbert Biological Sciences building, where she spends three-quarters of the year studying behavioral ecology.
Description: "Emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of relatively simple elements self-organizes to form more intelligent, more adaptive higher-level behavior. It's a bottom-up model, rather than being engineered by a general or a master planner; emergence begins at the ground level. Systems that at first glance seem vastly different - ant colonies, human brains, cities, immune systems - all turn out to follow the rules of emergence.

In each of these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies a scale above them: ants create colonies, urbanites create neighborhoods. In the tradition of Being Digital and The Tipping Point, Steven Johnson takes readers on an eye-opening intellectual journey from the discovery of emergence to its applications."--BOOK JACKET.