Why conversational equations and emergence (General)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Saturday, March 29, 2014, 22:43 (3673 days ago) @ romansh


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> Romansh: Is a pattern an example of emergence by your definition, and if not why not? Where does it fail according to your definition?-Again I feel the need to point out that this is a non-sequiter. A pattern may or may not be emergent, depending on the intent of the system/design/designer. A planned pattern is not necessarily emergent. Let me give you an example from the field of game design, which happens to be a field highly interested in the concept of emergence. -If I design a game system that allows for certain combinations of game play elements, and those elements when combined do not produce anything more than the sum of their parts, then there is no emergence. For example, if a fighter hits normally for 2d6 damage (read as the result of two six sided die), and a particular skill gives him a bonus of + 3 to that result, no emergence has occurred. There is nothing fundamentally new being added to the system, only alterations to existing properties. Even if there are a dozen skills, each of which alter the damage value, there is nothing new being added. There would be, however, a pattern which players would use to progress and maximize the potential of their fighter character. -Now, an example of an emergent property/pattern can be found in the wonderful example of the new game Everquest Next: Landmark. In this game, the world is built of tiny cubes called Voxels. A voxel is a cube that can be subdivided into smaller cubes of identical size. As part of their construction toolkit, they introduced a smoothing tool that was to be used to make the world seem less blocky by removing hard corners and edges from the voxel along the points of subdivision. However, when a single voxel was smoothed in a particular way a certain number of times, it would reduce itself to an even smaller cubic voxel! This was certainly not planned for. What's more, placing two of these 'micro-voxels' next to each other would cause the game engine to try and connect them together as it did with normal size voxels. The effect was something new and unexpected. There was also discovered a pattern to the way the system would try and weld everything together, and once that pattern was discovered, it was manipulated by players to create designs that the games creators had never imagined possible. -Subsequent research into the architecture quickly explained WHY and HOW this happened, but it was not something that was ever planned nor anticipated. It was an emergent property of three different systems that only happened when they were working together at the same time and under specific circumstances that none of the three systems could anticipate individually. So, to answer your question, it depends on the pattern, and what the end result of the pattern is. Chemistry and biology have numerous example of emergent patterns that provide new and unexpected functionality.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.