Emergent Complexity

Nature, it seems, is the popular name for milliards and milliards and milliards of particles playing their infinite game of billiards and billiards and billiards. [music] Our universe is very emergent, which is to say it is full of simple things that come together to make complex [music] things. It is a Lego universe, one that

is greater than the sum of its parts. [music] If you let atoms play their galactic game of billiards for a few billion years, eventually they form stars [music] and snowflakes, planets and people, galaxies and hot dogs. Surprisingly complex stuff emerges [music] from relatively simple stuff. [music] Emergence as a concept is weird. It is found absolutely everywhere and

yet it is hard to define in a formal general way. It is hard to study and predict with the normal tools of science. [music] Some say it requires a new kind of science but at the same time it's kind of intuitive. [music] You know it when you see it if you know what it looks like. I want to talk about

what emergence looks like. I'm Emergent Garden and I'm about to emerge all over the place. This video is a tour of emergent complexity which I will attempt to define. This will get a little technical and philosophical. I'm so sorry, but I hope mainly to be practical. I want to give some advice on how to recognize and

encourage emergent behavior. In the final chapter of this video, I will talk about how to make emergence. Now, I'm not a scientist. I am but a lowly programmer with some experience in trying to make emergent things. Computer programming is an especially potent playground for this kind of thing. So I will be using various algorithms to