That’s a fair point, actually. More generally, to say that a property emerges from the interaction of N nodes in a system, rather than being directly instantiated in one node of that system, is to say something nontrivial. And it’s not inane to use “emergent” as shorthand for that.
I hadn’t thought of that, and phrased that way, it even suggests a context in which one might care whether a property is emergent: an emergent feature of a program is more difficult to maintain than a directly-coded one.
This is not always true. There are (desired) emergent phenomena that are robust to a lot of minor tweaks to the underlying elements. For instance, neural nets are effective, even independent of the details of the individual neurons.
I would have said that you care whether a phenomenon is emergent because studying individual elements carefully is usually a bad way to understand emergent processes. We understand macroscopic hydrodynamics much better than we understand the precise forces between water molecules.
A denial-of-service attack is an “emergent phenomenon” that doesn’t involve any kind of complicated coordination whatsoever. No one request causes the server to be overloaded and time-out a large number of other requests. But tens of thousands of requests all at once can do so.
That’s a fair point, actually. More generally, to say that a property emerges from the interaction of N nodes in a system, rather than being directly instantiated in one node of that system, is to say something nontrivial. And it’s not inane to use “emergent” as shorthand for that.
I hadn’t thought of that, and phrased that way, it even suggests a context in which one might care whether a property is emergent: an emergent feature of a program is more difficult to maintain than a directly-coded one.
This is not always true. There are (desired) emergent phenomena that are robust to a lot of minor tweaks to the underlying elements. For instance, neural nets are effective, even independent of the details of the individual neurons.
I would have said that you care whether a phenomenon is emergent because studying individual elements carefully is usually a bad way to understand emergent processes. We understand macroscopic hydrodynamics much better than we understand the precise forces between water molecules.
Just ask a sysadmin.
A denial-of-service attack is an “emergent phenomenon” that doesn’t involve any kind of complicated coordination whatsoever. No one request causes the server to be overloaded and time-out a large number of other requests. But tens of thousands of requests all at once can do so.