Emergent computation: Self-organizing, collective, and cooperative phenomena in natural and artificial computing networks: Stephanie Forrest, ed.

✍ Scribed by Peter M. Todd

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1993
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 814 KB
• Volume: 60
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0004-3702
• DOI: 10.1016/0004-3702(93)90039-e

✦ Synopsis

Emergent Computation is a collection of 31 papers from the Ninth Annual Interdisciplinary Conference of the Center for Nonlinear Studies held at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1989. As the subtitle indicates, it presents a broad look at the ways that emergent behavior can be employed to process information in natural and artificial systems. This proceedings volume does a better job than most at conveying a coherent picture of a dynamic field. While there are certainly a few papers that will be of interest mainly to specialists, there are also several clear threads that wind through the book and tie together individual papers. Happily, these threads form a web of concepts in a mutually-supporting network. In reading several papers together, emergent phenomena themselves thus come into play: ideas are linked, connections and analogies made, and greater understanding is afforded than in reading these papers in isolation. This is a mark of good editing and selection, for which Forrest is to be commended. In this review, we will cover two of the main threads in this book. The first concerns the