“Future systems will be too complex to design and implement explicitly. Instead, we will have to learn to engineer complex behaviours indirectly: through the discovery and application of local rules of behaviour, applied to simple process components, from which desired behaviours predictably emerge through dynamic interactions between massive numbers of instances.”
Intelligent Design vs Emergent Design
Traditionally, the process of creating architecture has been approached as an intelligent design process, with a creative thinker driving the concept and construction from via top down process that usually begins with a static formic instance of an idea and dissected downwards towards lower level problems. However, it is my position that future architectures and other systems will demand greater complexity and therefore unable to be created with explicit design and implementation techniques. Rather, by assigning seemingly basic individual behaviors to design agents, complexity can be achieved through interactions, weighting, and layering these behaviors. The human designer still has a vital role to play in the design of the final product. Instead of designing by sketching, prototyping, and reflecting, the design thinking operates on the level of understanding, composing, and customizing these base layer of simplistic behaviors to produce a design object that reflects the design goals. However, there still exist many barriers to the realization of the widespread use of this emerging design process. This work attempts to address some of these issues by implementing a software that can aid the designer in understanding the rules these base behaviors operate on and intelligently designing the interactions of behaviors, composing specific and varied behaviors into cohesive systems, and customizing these behaviors to suit the specific needs of the design challenge. To achieve this end, this software is more open and easy to use than existing softwares and code libraries for agent-based design.
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“Something else that can emerge from emergent engineering are unexpected relationships between different domains of study (e.g. swarms, streams, plasma dynamics and maze solving). These relationships may not have been noticed before, as the low-level agents generating the emergent behaviours have quite different physics and scales”
“Emergence is not a new idea. From more than two centuries ago, Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand [37] is sometimes cited as a paragon of emergence, whereby an economic agent: 4 Peter H. Welch et al. “neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it … he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.””
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ftp://ftp.cs.kent.ac.uk/pub/phw/sei-cmu/boldly/submitted-boldly.pdf