I believe I first came across the term emergence in relation to Langton’s Ant, in a book section loosely centered on game theory. In the book, the patterns formed by the progression of Langton’s Ant were termed ‘emergent’ because they could not be predicted except by running the program. One could not, with full knowledge of the simple rules that governed the Ant’s world, predict what the pattern would look like after x iterations, or where the ant would be.
Given this, I would not call the location of a dropped object at time t after the drop an ‘emergent property’, because given the laws that govern how it will fall and the initial values of the system (height and mass of object, area perpendicular to motion, density of air etc etc) I can accurately predict the object’s location and momentum without having to actually drop it and see where it is.
So an emergent system is one wherein the simple base rules do not enable one to predict the large scale order or consequences (I suppose lack of order too), whereas a system which is not emergent is one wherein knowledge of the governing rules enables a prediction which can later be proven by running of the system.
Prime numbers are thus an emergent phenomenon of how numbers related to each other (unless someone has found a way to predict them while I wasn’t paying attention), whereas even numbers are not.
I believe I first came across the term emergence in relation to Langton’s Ant, in a book section loosely centered on game theory. In the book, the patterns formed by the progression of Langton’s Ant were termed ‘emergent’ because they could not be predicted except by running the program. One could not, with full knowledge of the simple rules that governed the Ant’s world, predict what the pattern would look like after x iterations, or where the ant would be. Given this, I would not call the location of a dropped object at time t after the drop an ‘emergent property’, because given the laws that govern how it will fall and the initial values of the system (height and mass of object, area perpendicular to motion, density of air etc etc) I can accurately predict the object’s location and momentum without having to actually drop it and see where it is.
So an emergent system is one wherein the simple base rules do not enable one to predict the large scale order or consequences (I suppose lack of order too), whereas a system which is not emergent is one wherein knowledge of the governing rules enables a prediction which can later be proven by running of the system. Prime numbers are thus an emergent phenomenon of how numbers related to each other (unless someone has found a way to predict them while I wasn’t paying attention), whereas even numbers are not.