TGGP3 comments on The Futility of Emergence - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 August 2007 10:10PM

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Comment author: TGGP3 27 August 2007 02:18:03AM 5 points [-]

I remember when Warren Spector & Harvey Smith were going on about emergence in videogames. I think their definition was something like "a non-obvious [it may even surprise the designers] outcome of a system of rules rather than something scripted". That's a rather subjective definition but it seems to fit as well for the things that are described as "emergent" in real life. Since life is not actually a videogame but has universally valid rules, it would not be a very useful concept for that domain. I think Wolfram has written a lot about that sort of thing, but I don't actually know much about what it is he says other than that its an important idea.