The Steven Johnson book that inspired the Vaux journey into self-organization.

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Product Description

It is fast becoming clear that our lives revolve around the powers of emergence. Order arrives from the bottom-up, not top-down. Complexity is resolved through simplicity. Everywhere the same laws are obeyed, the same swarm logic is at work. EMERGENCE looks at the cities we inhabit, the media frenzies we suffer and the games we play, showing how individual actions without central planning often create a wonderfully adaptive communal intelligence. In this compelling, revelatory book, Johnson investigates the artificial emergence which is bringing sweeping cultural and political change in its wake. Rich with insights into the future, this book allows us to witness the exhilating arrival and sudden ascendancy of a potent new idea.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33689 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
As Steven Johnson explains with a rare lucidity in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, an individual ant, like an individual neuron, is just about as dumb as can be. Connect enough of them together properly, though, and you get spontaneous intelligence. Starting with the weird behaviour of the semi-colonial organisms we call slime molds, Johnson details the development of increasingly complex and familiar behaviour among simple components: cells, insects and software developers all find their place in greater schemes.

Most game players, alas, live on something close to day-trader time, at least when they're in the middle of a game--thinking more about their next move than their next meal, and usually blissfully oblivious to the 10-or-20-year trajectory of software development. No-one wants to play with a toy that's going to be fun after a few decades of tinkering--the toys have to be engaging now, or kids will find other toys.

Johnson has a knack for explaining complicated and counterintuitive ideas cleverly without stealing the scene. Though we're far from fully understanding how complex behaviour manifests from simple units and rules, our awareness that such emergence is possible is guiding research across disciplines. Readers unfamiliar with the sciences of complexity will find Emergence an excellent starting point, while those who were chaotic before it was cool will appreciate its updates and wider scope. --Rob Lightner

The Guardian
" Mind-expanding...intelligent, witty and tremendously thought-provoking"

Steven Pinker
"Fascinating and timely"

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Customer Reviews

A book of two halves
The first half is excelent, and worth buying the book for alone. It clearly explains, by jumping from ants to 12th century silk traders in Florence, how micro-motives (e.g. individual ants releasing and following pheromones), can - unconsciously - lead to macro-behaviour (e.g. an ant colony finding the shortest path to a food source).

By contrast the second half is more speculative, in particular whether the world wide web is emerging and thus whther it will - like SkyNet in the Terminator movies - become sentient. It might interest many readers, but personally I would have preferred the pages devoted to a deeper - slightly more scientific - view of how the simple rules (e.g. get close, but not too close, to your neighbour) can lead to complex organised behaviour (e.g. birds flocking without any "leader" in the sense of one that the others follow).

Overall a good book, and one worth buying and reading to the end, but one that Dawkins could have done better.

This engrossing read has reignited my passion for Complexity
I have dipped into many of the books floating abouton Complexity and I must confess that I have really enjoyed this one. So it does tend to focus on computing games, ant colonies and slime mold. But hey, I've started to bore my mates about just how clever slime mold and ant colonies are - as well as actually starting to think there is more to computing games than sad geeks playing Tomb Raider. There is a plethora of books by the Kauffmans and Lewins of this world to suit the biologists and anthropologists among us. It's an easy read and has provided tangible examples of Complex Adaptive Systems: voice recongition software, cities, media frenzy as well as the ubiquitous slime mold. In the end it has to be appreciated for what it is: a very readable insight that manages to demystify what can be a very mathematically-dogged and elite subject area.

Technologically informed and beautifully written
This is really appealing science writing, all the more impressive for constructing its own place from pieces of an awful lot of different disciplines and discourses. Particularly note-worthy are the book's grounding in intellectual history (eg the explicit links between Jane Jacobs' ideas on cities and Warren Weaver's Rockefeller Foundation prospectus for studies of organized complexity) and its excellent insights into how to design systems that become self-organizing on the web (slashdot, etc). It's also full of wonderful throwaways delivered with the sort of tone that just makes you think that this is a nice person to have tell you things.
The book's main drawbacks, it seems to me, are an unwillingness to differentiate between spontaneous emergence and emergence in evolved systems (such as ant colonies) and a perhaps-related lack of discussion of the history of the concept of the superorgansim in ecology, where it originates. But though these make it incomplete, they don't undermine its insights into designing systems for emergence, which are, I think, the heart of the book. A minor drawback is a slight reluctance to push at the political aspects of the work -- to look at the ideologies built into rules of emergence in something like Sim City.
Given these caveats, I must admit that an honest rating would be 4 stars; but since the only review posted so far gives it an unfair-to-my-mind one star I've tried to boost the average. This second guessing of the software running Amazon is probably against Johnson's principles - I should behave with a straight-forward ant-like honesty and expect the right average star rating to come out regardless. But what the hell.