references to COMPUTATIONAL EMERGENCE

Gessler, Nicholas (gessler@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU)
Tue, 31 May 1994 13:58:00 PDT

Sarich was interested in references on the concept of emergence under
whatever name. It would certainly be nice to see an historical trajectory of
the referents to the term and its auxilliary concepts, and its relation to
discussions of teleology, reductionism, vitalism, etc. I can offer the
following recent sources, but all refer to deterministic computational
emergence, a referent which cannot be more than a few decades old. It would
be enlightening to know in what ways computational emergence is congruent
with pre-computational definitions of the term. An answer to that question
would likely have to wait for the results of computational approaches to
pre-computationally formulated problems in t he biological and social
evolutionary sciences. Nevertheless, it does seem that we now have a
computational method for dealing with some problems which were intractable
when Kroeber was formulating his arguments on the "superorganic" in 1917.

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CELLULAR AUTOMATA:

Gutowitz, Howard, editor 1991. CELLULAR AUTOMATA - THEORY AND EXPERIMENT.
Special Issues of Phyusica D. Cambridge: MIT Press, A Bradford Book
(Elsevier Science).

Forrest, Stephanie, editor 1991. EMERGENT COMPUTATION - SELF-ORGANIZING,
COLLECTIVE, AND COOPERATIVE PHENOMENA IN NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL COMPUTING
NETWORKS. Special Issues of Physica D. Cambridge: MIT Press, A Bradford
Book, (Elsevier Science).

AMERICAN ARTIFICIAL LIFE:

Langton, Christopher G., editor 1989. ARTIFICIAL LIFE (I) - PROCEEDINGS OF
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP ON THE SYNTHESIS AND SIMULATION OF LIVING
SYSTEMS, HELD SEPTEMBER 1987 IN LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO. Santa Fe Institute,
Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Volume VI. Redwood City:
Addison-Wesley.

Langton, Christopher G., Charles Taylor, J. Doyne Farmer, and Steen
Rasmussen, editors 1991. ARTIFICIAL LIFE II - PROCEEDINGS OF THE WORKSHOP ON
ARTIFICIAL LIFE HELD FEBRUARY 1990 IN SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO. Santa Fe
Institute, Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proceedings Volume X.
Redwood City: Addison-Wesley.

Langton, Christopher, G., editor 1994. ARTIFICIAL LIFE III - PROCEEDINGS OF
THE WORKSHOP ON ARTIFICIAL LIFE HELD JUNE, 1992 IN SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO.
Santa Fe Institute, Stucies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proceedings Volume
XVII. Reading: Addison-Wesley.

Brooks, Rodney and Pattie Maes, editors 1994. ARTIFICIAL LIFE IV -
PROCEEDINGS OF THE WORKSHOP ON ARTIFICIAL LIFE HELD JULY, 1994 IN CAMBRIDGE,
MASSACHUSETTS. Cambridge: MIT Press, A Bradford Book. (In Press.)

EUROPEAN ARTIFICIAL LIFE:

Varela, Francisco J. and Paul Bourgine, editors 1992. TOWARD A PRACTICE OF
AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS - PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIRST EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON
ARTIFICIAL LIFE. Cambridge: MIT Press, A Bradford Book.

Meyer, Jean-Arcady and Stewart W. Wilson, editors 1991. FROM ANIMALS TO
ANIMATS - PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SIMULATION OF
ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR. Cambridge: MIT Press, A Bradford Book.

Meyer, Jean-Arcady Meyer, Herbert L. Roitblat, and Stewart W. Wilson, editors
1993. FROM ANIMALS TO ANIMATS 2 - PROCEEDINGS OF THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL
CONFERENCE ON SIMULATION OF ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR. Cambridge: MIT Press, A
Bradford Book.

JOURNALS:

ARTIFICIAL LIFE, edited by Christopher G. Langton. Cambridge: MIT Press
Journals.

ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR, edited by Jean-Arcady Meyer. Cambridge: MIT Press
Journals.

EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTING, edited by Kenneth De Jong. Cambridge: MIT Press
Journals.

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NOTE: Rodney Brooks has written a series of entertaining articles on the
ramifications of the concept entitled "Elephants Don't Play Chess,"
"Intelligence Without Reason," and "Intelligence Without Representation."
Luc Steels has defined several ranked levels of emergence, from
"self-organization" to "emergent functionality" which should appear in press
soon. Both gentlement work in robotics and are trying, among other things,
to design robots which will work together cooperatively. This is a sort of
robot "culture."

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Nick Gessler
gessler@anthro.sscnet.ucla.edu
gessler@alife.santafe.edu

"Artificial Life is 'rich.'"
Ernst Mayr, Stephen Gould, Anatol Rapoport.
(Ostentatious appeal to authority.)

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