EmergenceReadingList - Emergent Wiki

1. Emergence Reading List

This following is a list of references for those interested in all aspects of emergence. Please feel free to add to, and organize the following.

1.1. General Introductions

Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Perseus Books, 1994.

Comments: This is written for a general audience by the Executive Editor of "Wired." The concepts presented "have been largely condensed, paraphrased, or quoted from conversations, correspondence and lengthy interviews" with experts from a variety of fields, including Rodney Brooks, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstader, John Holland, John Hopfield, Stewart Kauffman, Chris Langton, Mitchel Resnick, Craig Reynolds, and Stephen Wolfram. The annotated bibliography provides many sources for a diverse audience.

Stephen Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Scribner, 2001.

Comments: This is written for a general audience. It presents a good history of concepts and some of the broader implications of "distributed systems" ideas.

John Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order, Perseus Books, 1999.

Chapters: (1) Before We Proceed (2) Games and Numbers (3) Maps, Game Theory, and Computer-Based Modeling (4) Checkers (5) Neural Nets (6) Towards a General Setting (7) Constraing Generating Procedures, Cgp's (8) Samuel's Checkersplayer and Other Models as Cgp's (9) Variation (10) Levels of Description and Reduction (11) Metaphor and Innovation (12) Closing

Mitchel Resnick, Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds, MIT Press, 1995.

Comments: Very clearly written. It contains a nice explanations of decentralized versus centralized mindsets. It describes approaches for how people can "become intellectually engaged with new types of systems and new types of thinking that characterize this new [decentralized] era."

Grand, Steve, Creation: Life and how to make it, 2000. A light treatment from the author of the game Creatures.

1.2. History of Emergence

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Adam Smith.
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) by Charles Darwin. On-line
Emergence in psychology: Lessons from the history of non-reductionist science in Human Development. R. Keith Sawyer (2002). PDF
Emergence and Levels of Abstraction, by R.I. Damper. PDF (Credits David Hume, 1711-1776)
The Problem of Reductionism in Science, edited by Evandro Agazzi (1991). Kluwer Academic Press.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/

1.3. Complexity Theory

Waldrop, M. (1993) "Complexity"
Brown, James H. "An ecological perspective on the challenge of complexity," an NCEAS Eco-Essay. http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/nceas-web/resources/ecoessay/brown/index.html
John Holland, Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, Perseus Books, 1995.

Comments: Holland describes 7 basic elements common to all complex adaptive systems and describes a possibly unifying "class of models" called Echo
Chapters: (1) basis elements (2) adaptive agents (3) echoing emergence (4) simulating echo (5) towards theory

1.4. Complexity in Nature

Ian Stewart, Life?s Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1998.

Comments: The annotated bibliography provides many more sources.
Chapters: (1) What is Life? (2) Before Life Began (3) The Frozen Accident (4) The Oxygen Menace (5) Artificial Life (6) Flowers fro Fibonacci (7) Morphogens and Mona Lisas (8) The Peacock's Tale (9) Walk on the Wild Side (10) An Exaltations of Boids (11) Reef Wars (12) In Search of Secrets

Per Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. 1996.

Chapters: (1) Complexity and Criticality (2) The Discovery of Self-Organized Criticality (3) The Sandpile Paradigm (4) Real Sandpiles and Landscape Formation (5) Earthquakes, Starquakes, and Solar Flares (6) The "Game of Life": Complexity Is Criticality (7) Is Life a Self-Organized Crical Phenomenon (8) Mass Extinctions and Punctuated Equilibria in a Simple Model of Evolution (9) Theory of the Punctuated Equilibrium Model (10) The Brain (11) On Economics and Traffic Jams

Gary Flake, The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation, MIT Press, 4th Printing 2001.

Chapters: (1) Computation (2) Fractals (3) Chaos (4) Complex Systems (5) Adaptation

1.5. Connected Networks, Network Theory

Duncan J. Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W. W. Norton, March 2003)
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (2000)
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: The New Science of Networks (Perseus, 2002)
Mark Buchanan, Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks (W. W. Norton)

1.6. Emergent Cognitive Models

Hofstadter, Douglas. "Who shoves Whom around in the careenium?"
Hofstadter, Douglas. "Subcognition as computation"
Mitchell, Melanie. "Analogy-making as a complex adaptive system", http://dangermouse.brynmawr.edu/ec/amcas.ps.gz

1.7. Information Theory

Shannon, Claude (1948). "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". http://dangermouse.brynmawr.edu/ec/shannon1948.pdf
Crutchfield. , James P. "The Calculi of Emergence: Computation, Dynamics, and Induction", Part 1, Part 2.
Robert Axtell. A Positive Theory of Emergence for Multi-Agent Systems, apparently the title of a talk, given in Jan 2003, University of Michigan.

1.8. Emergent Computation

Computer Science Application: Evolving Cellular Automata to Perform Computations, Mitchell, Crutchfield, and Das. In "Handbook of Evolutionary Computation", Back, Fogel, and Michalewicz (eds). http://dangermouse.brynmawr.edu/ec/papers/handbook-of-ec.ps
"Resource Sharing And Coevolution In Evolving Cellular Automata", by Werfel, Mitchell, and Crutchfield.
Is anything ever new?, James Crutchfield. http://dangermouse.brynmawr.edu/ec/EverNew.pdf
Ward, Em, Blank, Douglas S., Rolniak, Douglas, and Thompson, Dale R. (2001). Complexity as Fitness for Evolved Cellular Automata Update Rules. In Late Breaking Papers of the 2001 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. http://dangermouse.brynmawr.edu/papers/gecco-gaca.pdf
Langton, Chris. "The Edge of Chaos"
Revisiting the Edge of Chaos: Evolving Cellular Automata to Perform Computations, by Melanie Mitchell, Peter T. Hraber, and James P. Crutchfield. http://www.santafe.edu/projects/evca/Papers/rev-edge.html

1.9. Swarm Systems, Small World Networks, Genetic Algorithms, Cellular Automata

Eric Bonabeau, Marco Dorigo, Guy Theraulaz, Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Duncan Watts, Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness, Princeton University Press, 1999.
Melanie Mitchell, An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms, MIT Press, 6th Printing 1999.
M. Dorigo, V. Maniezzo, A. Colorni, The Ant System: Optimization by a Colony of Cooperating Agents, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics?Part B, 26:29-41, 1996. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~mdorigo/ACO/publications.html
Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Media, 2002.

1.10. Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics

Talman, Physics
Dynamic Statistical Mechanics

1.11. Evolutionary Electronics

Evolutionary Electronics - Thompson and Harvey, Sussex http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adrianth/ade.html

"Circuits designed by humans are constrained by the abstractions, modelling and methodologies used. Here, there are no such constraints. Evolution proceeds by manipulating the real physical electronic medium and judging the consequences: no modelling, abstraction or analysis. This opens up the potential for exploitation of the natural continuous-time dynamics of the hardware in circuits with a richer spatio-temporal structure than normally envisaged. Evolution can exploit all of the physical properties of the primordial electronic soup provided on the FPGA."

Amorphous computing - Sussman and Abelson, MIT, http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/projects/amorphous/

"The objective of this research is to create the system-architectural, algorithmic, and technological foundations for exploiting programmable materials. These are materials that incorporate vast numbers of programmable elements that react to each other and to their environment."

1.12. Miscellaneous

1.12.1. No Free Lunch Theorem

On the Futility of Blind Search, Joseph C. Culberson. On-line