Related papers: What is emergence, after all?
If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to…
Complex systems can be described at myriad different scales, and their causal workings often have multiscale structure (e.g., a computer can be described at the microscale of its hardware circuitry, the mesoscale of its machine code, and…
Numerous definitions for complexity have been proposed over the last half century, with little consensus achieved on how to use the term. A definition of complexity is supplied here that is closely related to the Kolmogorov Complexity and…
Self-Organization is of growing importance for large distributed computing systems. In these systems, a central control and manual management is exceedingly difficult or even impossible. Emergence is widely recognized as the core principle…
This letter seeks to illuminate the profound connection between complexity, self-organization, emergent behaviour, pattern formation, and entropy concepts that are foundational to understanding our universe. By examining these ideas through…
Synergy (from the Greek word synergos), broadly defined, refers to combined or co-operative effects produced by two or more elements (parts or individuals). The definition is often associated with the holistic conviction quote that "the…
Although the traits emerged in a mass gathering are often non-deliberative, the act of mass impulse may lead to irre- vocable crowd disasters. The two-fold increase of carnage in crowd since the past two decades has spurred significant…
Despite recent advances in uncovering the quantitative features of stationary human activity patterns, many applications, from pandemic prediction to emergency response, require an understanding of how these patterns change when the…
There is considerable and growing interest in the emergence of novel technologies, especially from the policy-making perspective. Yet as an area of study, emerging technologies lacks key foundational elements, namely a consensus on what…
Entropy can signify different things: For instance, heat transfer in thermodynamics or a measure of information in data analysis. Many entropies have been introduced and it can be difficult to ascertain their different importance and…
Assessing and managing the impact of large-scale epidemics considering only the individual risk and severity of the disease is exceedingly difficult and could be extremely expensive. Economic consequences, infrastructure and service…
We propose a new paradigm for emergence of macroscopic flows. The latter are considered as a collective phenomenon created by many agents that exchange abstract information. The information exchange causes agents to change their relative…
Is reduction always a good scientific strategy? Does it always lead to a gain in information? The very existence of the special sciences above and beyond physics seems to hint no. Previous research has shown that dimension reduction…
Understanding the mechanisms underlying the emergence of leadership in multi-agent systems is still under investigation in many areas of research where group coordination is involved. While leadership has been mostly investigated in the…
As far as human perceptions and rational thinking are concerned, contradictions constitute a non negligible part of our reality. We often refer to these phenomena, in a more informal way, as the chicken or the egg causality dilemma.…
In another paper (Butterfield 2011), one of us argued that emergence and reduction are compatible, and presented four examples illustrating both. The main purpose of this paper is to develop this position for the example of phase…
The fast changing reality in technical and natural domains perceived by always more accurate observations has drawn attention on new and very broad class of systems with specific behaviour represented under the common wording complexity.…
This article investigates emergence and complexity in complex systems that can share information on a network. To this end, we use a theoretical approach from information theory, computability theory, and complex networks. One key studied…
Chaotic itinerancy is a universal dynamical concept that describes itinerant motion among many different ordered states through chaotic transition in dynamical systems. Unlike the expectation of the prevalence of chaotic itinerancy in…
In this paper we study the emergence of coherence in collective motion described by a system of interacting motiles endowed with an inner, adaptative, steering mechanism. By means of a nonlinear parametric coupling, the system elements are…