Malec, J. (1993). On Formal Analysis of Emergent Properties. Technical Report LiTH-IDA-R-93-45, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden. Accepted to Second European Workshop on Planning (EWSP'93), Vadstena, Sweden, 9-11 December 1993. (bibtex),
Abstract: Brooks postulates in his papers [6, 7] the possibility that intelligence can emerge out of a set of simple, loosely coupled behaviours. This possibility is conjectured on the basis of experiments with a set of robots equipped with subsumption-based control systems. In this paper we briefly present The Behaviour Language (BL) used for programming subsumption systems and we show that any BL program is equivalent to a statechart. Then we analyze a simple emergent behaviour and argue that it actually is obtained through appropriate tuning of delays defined in the controlling BL program. The conclusion is that emergent properties arise (if at all) due to the complex dynamics of interactions among the simple behaviours and that this emergence is to a large extent accidental.
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