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So in thinking about the lectures on week nine I was particularly struck by the idea of order arising out of chaos. In biological systems we see examples of, for a lack of a better word, spontaneous order all the time. Ant colonies, schools of fish, and even humans (as evidenced by the eye sore of a dirt path bisecting Merion Green) were mentioned in class. To gain a further understanding of "order out of chaos" I recently watched a segment from NOVA Science Now (link provided below, by the way why can't we upload a video onto the blog?) on emergence, which apparently addresses the idea at hand. Several points I found interesting:

1. there are no leader/follower relationships
2. instead of top to bottom order, it's bottom to top
3. behavior of the whole is more than the sum of its parts
4. while often seen in living systems, a computer program was able to shed light on emergence (more on this later)
5. complexity level in processing information is directly affected by how connected parts are to each other
6. one neuron of the human brain connects to 10 thousand other neurons (so yeah, we're pretty complex creatures!)
7. molecules of pyruvic acid (a very simple compund that could have been abundant during early Earth) when put under the environmental strains present during Earth's infancy rearrange themselves in water to form vesicles. is this how life began?

The computer program (used for playing checkers) mentioned above shed light on the idea of "order in chaos" because after many games it began to favor programed moves that were proven to be more efficient in winning the game. After a while, it even beat the programmer at his own game. The scientist interviewed for the show brought up the idea that following simple rules leads to learning, a form of complex processing. Could the computer program be an electronic model of our brain?     

Emergence