Emergence

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Just finished ‘Emergence – the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software’, by Steven Johnson.  Nothing earth-shatteringly new, but a fairly enjoyable trip through some familiar themes – the emergence of cohesive group behaviour in Ant colonies, the ability that cities have to develop into reasonably efficient, highly complex systems without central planning, a discussion of the strength of user-moderated communities such as Slashdot, and some stuff about adaptive software – code that figures out for itself solutions to a problem, rather than following a linear set of logic instructions.

Not particularly in-depth, and chapters about the Web were weaker than the others, but a good introductory read.

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