Abstract
Emergence can be defined as the formation of order from disorder based on self-organisation. Humans—by looking at a self-organising system—can decide intuitively whether emergence was taking place or not. To build self-organising technical systems we need to automate the recognition of emergent behaviour. In this paper we try to give a quantitative and practically usable definition of emergence. The presented theoretical approach is applied to an experimental environment, which shows emergent behaviour. An Observer/Controller architecture with emergence detectors is introduced. The proposed definition of emergence is discussed in comparison with Shannon’s information theoretical approach.
© 2006 IEEE. Reprinted, with permission, from: Mnif, M. and Müller-Schloer, C.: “Quantitative Emergence”. In: 2006 IEEE Mountain Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Systems, pp. 78–84, 24–26 July 2006, doi:10.1109/SMCALS.2006.250695.
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Mnif, M., Müller-Schloer, C. (2011). Quantitative Emergence. In: Müller-Schloer, C., Schmeck, H., Ungerer, T. (eds) Organic Computing — A Paradigm Shift for Complex Systems. Autonomic Systems, vol 1. Springer, Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-0130-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-0130-0_2
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