Emergent thoughts for the day

  • The concept of emergence might be more useful than that of coincidence in explaining the world.


  • Self-adaptive systems work in a top-down manner. They evaluate their own global behavior and change it when the evaluation indicates that they are not accomplishing what they were intended to do, or when better functionality or performance is possible.


  • Self-organizing systems work bottom-up. They are composed of a large number of components that interact locally according to simple rules. The global behavior of the system emerges from these local interactions, and it is difficult to deduce properties of the global system by studying only the local properties of its parts.

Virgin Active

I lock up my gym gear. The locker I use for my bag is empty except for some half-used men’s perfume which I decide would be nice to have. I go into the gym. I return to find the padlock gone and the bag, so fearing theft approach the front desk. No, she replied, it was just that you were in someone else’s locker (though nothing indicated this) so we broke the lock and took your bag. “Can I have my bag please,” I said. “Can I have a new lock please,” I added. “Yes, she said, do you know how to use this kind of lock?”. “Yes, I said. In fact I was only broken into two weeks ago at home so it’s nice to get upgraded.” Then added, “Oh, by the way here’s the guy’s perfume he left in the locker.”