Emergence in culture and engineering
Emergent processes or behaviours can be seen in many places, from any multicellular biological
organism to traffic patterns, cities or organizational phenomena in computer simulations and cellular automata. 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. Agents, or investors, have 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.
WWW
The World Wide Web (WWW) is a popular example of a decentralized system exhibiting emergent properties. There is no central organization rationing the number of links, yet the number of links pointing to each page follows a power law in which a few pages are linked to many times and most pages are seldom linked to. A related property of the network of links in the world wide web is that almost any pair of pages can be connected to each other through a relatively short chain of links. Although relatively well known now, this property was initially unexpected in an unregulated network. It is shared with many other types of networks called small-world networks.
Architecture and Cities
Emergent structures appear at many different levels of organization or as spontaneous order. Emergent self-organization appears frequently in cities where no planning or zoning entity predetermined the layout of the city. The interdisciplinary study of emergent behaviours is not generally considered a homogeneous field, but divided across its application or problem domains.
The on-course action and vehicle progression of the 2007 Urban Challenge could possibly regarded as an example of cybernetic emergence. Patterns of road use, nondeterministic obstacle clearance times, etc. will work together to form a complex emergent pattern that can not be deterministically planned in advance.
Mathematics
Although the above examples of emergence are often contentious, mathematics provides a rigorous basis for defining and demonstrating emergence. In Emergence is coupled to scope, not level, Alex Ryan shows that a Möbius strip has emergent properties. The Möbius strip is a one-sided, one-edged surface. Further, a Möbius strip can be constructed from a set of two-sided, three edged, triangular surfaces. Only the complete set of triangles is one-sided and one-edged: any subset does not share these properties. Therefore, the emergent property can be said to emerge precisely when the final piece of the Möbius strip is put in place. An emergent property is a spatially or temporally extended feature – it is coupled to a definite scope, and cannot be found in any component because the components are associated with a narrower scope.
Games
Emergent behavior is also important in games and game design. For example, the game of poker, especially in no limit forms without a rigid betting structure, is largely driven by emergent behavior. For example, no rule requires that any player should fold, but usually many players do. Because the game is driven by emergent behavior, play at one poker table might be radically different from that at another, while the rules of the game are exactly the same. Variations of games that develop are examples of emergent metaplay, the predominant catalyst of the evolution of new games.
Fads and Beliefs
An emergent concept (EC) is a slight variation on consensus reality that is accepted as plausible. The hallmarks of an emergent concept, as opposed to other memes (urban myths, or viruses of the mind) are that EC are increasingly accepted as truth or possibility, based upon other empirical or anecdotal evidence in the mind of the believer or society (in its subsets) as a whole. EC can be viewed as fad, or common causal reality building. EC have no relationship to truth or fact, but are simply engines bringing individual concepts of truth into the mainstream.
