Johnson's Emergence Chapters 2-3

• Johnson talks about ants and the central intelligence of a colony with relation to swarm logic on page 74
• Gordons 5 fundamental principles of bottom up intelligence is on page 78
• On page 84 Johnson talks about how complex organisms come from simple beginnings
• Krugmans system is discussed with its 2 axioms and business example on page 90
• Johnsons talks about Jane Jacobs and the idea of sidewalks being important for flows of information in cities on page 94
• Johnson discusses cities and thier ability to store and retrieve information on page 100
• On page 104, Johnson talks about how cities are a pattern in time, which is like all emergent systems
• Page 108 is about clustering and how neighborhood systems function like a user interface
• New flows of energy cause new kinds of cities to develop, and this is on page 113
• Johnsons talks about how intelligence requires connectedness and organization on page 117
• Page 123 - 124 talks about Alexa, and how it has bidirectional linking which is different from the internet and its one directional linking
• On page 125 Johnson makes the claim that smart technology makes us dumber

The class discussion was helpful with talking about the idea of emergent systems with respect to the any colony. We talked about swarm logic to begin with, and asked the question as to how the entire organism was able to survive and grow with individual parts being short lived. In this case the individual parts were the ants, and the colony was the larger organism that evolved over time. This idea was unclear to me before we went into class. I understood what Johnson was saying, but I was having a hard time figuring out exactly how the system could grow with a completely new set of ants each year. I think we came to the conclusion that with the colony growing and living through the course of the queens life, it builds up information that helps it survive, and therefore doesn't necessarily need the same ants each year. It doesn't matter so much about the individual short lived parts, because the colony is also an organism that grows and evolves by itself.

Another thing in class that was helpful was the discussion about Alexa. We came to the conlusion that although Alexa and similar programs that have this bidirectional linking, they don't necessarily make the internet as a whole an emergent system. This showed that although on a smaller level a program can show emergence possibly by looking at user interaction and making connections, the internet is just too big and chaotic with too many websites and programs for it to be able to be considered an emergent system