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130 of 144 found the following review helpful:
 Reads like a magazine articleApr 14, 2002
By Dennis Muzza
This book attempts to explain artificial intelligence in terms of how ant colonies, cities, and modern software operate. If it seems to have the feel of a magazine article, it's because it's not written by a professional in the field but by a professional writer who is a frequent contributor to trendy, popular publications such as Feed and Wired. Although it did not give me the understanding I was looking for about emergence theory, I would not dismiss it completely because it does have a lot of interesting information, as any good magazine article would. It has an overview of Jane Jacobs new urbanism that is both complete and illustrating, it explains how an intelligent kind of feedback makes some web sites successful as virtual communities, and what I found most interesting, how video games are evolving in ways that seem to give them a life of their own. If you are looking for an insightful, deep look at artificial intelligence for the layman, Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach" is still unchallenged. On the other hand if you are looking for a more relaxed, amusing and down to earth approach, filled with cool stuff you can impress your friends with, this book is for you.
532 of 621 found the following review helpful:
 How not to learn about emergenceSep 14, 2002
By Edward A. Fagen
"music lover"
Steven Johnson's "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" (Scribner, New York, 2001),is a very bad book, shallow, careless, and disappointing. I was lured by its nominal subject, which interests me greatly, and now I'm sorry I bought it. Mr. Johnson is a young- very young- video gamer who has managed to parlay a superficial aquaintance with the vocabulary of modern science into a series of trendy popular books, incomprehensibly praised by such authorities as Steven Pinker and Esther Dyson.
The book opens with a fraudulent pictorial simile, juxtaposing a side view of the human brain and a map of Hamburg ca. 1850. Indeed they do resemble each other, and the reader is supposed to infer (with no help from Johnson) that the resemblance arises from the operation of similar governing principles. Quite apart from the validity of this conclusion, it apparently does not trouble Johnson that the brain is three-dimensional and the city map is essentially two-dimensional, or that the comparison would fail if a frontal view of the brain had been chosen, or if Paris or El Paso or Denver had been chosen instead of Hamburg.
It gets worse. At the most fundamental level, after reading the book I find it impossible to say what the author means by "emergence", his nominal title. When he discusses ant colonies it appears to mean swarm intelligence; when he discusses video games it appears to mean interactive software; at still other places it appears to mean whatever recent developments in the realm of computers or biophysics or city planning that he approves of.
Moreover, he appears to be totally ignorant of all science and mathematics that preceded his own adolescence. Although he has a great deal to say about self-organizing systems, you will search the index in vain for the names of John Conway, Oskar Morgenstern, John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, Stephen Wolfram, or most of the other pioneers of the field. When he does recognize a figure from antiquity (i.e., pre-1970), it is with worshipful adulation. He italicizes the name of Marvin Minsky as if he were a demigod, and finds a book by Norbert Wiener "curiously brilliant". What exactly is the curiosity?- that a brilliant mathematician should write a brilliant book? Likewise, you will find no entry in the index under "Boolean networks" or "cellular automata" or "crystallization" or "ferromagnetism." Under "entropy" you will find only the ludicrous assertion that in nonequilibrium thermodynamics "the laws of entropy are temporarily overcome." In short, Mr. Johnson gives new meaning to the phrase "born yesterday," a degree of ignorance and juvenile solipsism that borders on arrogance.
I note that other reader-reviewers assert that the book will provide lay persons with an introduction to a new science. No, it won't. The only thing it will provide is an introduction to bad science.
38 of 41 found the following review helpful:
Mediocre At BestJan 30, 2002
By Rebecca Bryant
Johnson has a riveting introduction and opening but the rest of the book falls flat with a superficial treatment of emergence. The author would also have the reader think that he knows alot about cities and their development, but his actual understanding of the subject is very, very thin.Try "Signs of Life" by Richard Sole and Brian Goodwin for a much better elucidation of complexity science and the role of emergence. Another book just out is "Self Organization in Biological Systems" published by Princten University Press as part of its series on complexity science.
26 of 27 found the following review helpful:
 Intelligence (and more) from Unenlighted Little PartsNov 20, 2001
By R. Hardy
"Rob Hardy"
If you see an ant, you pay it little attention. It's the lines of ants that are really fascinating, and the colonies that really get things done. An ant by itself is not only a speck, it is a humble one, capable of little. It isn't just a matter of getting a lot of ants together so that by sheer numbers they multiply what one ant can do. Ants organize. They communicate. They have tasks, they assign workers, they shift assignments as old jobs get done and new ones come up. We have tried to understand this sort of organization in our own way. To get such things done ourselves, we would have to have a leader and subleaders, and in trying to understand ants, we even attributed to the queen of the ant colony a sort of CEO status. She isn't, of course; she is an egg-laying machine, but she is deep in the darkest parts of the colony, and has no idea about what her workers are doing or how to respond to quality assurance suggestions. She is not the chief of the bureaucracy of the ant colony. Something else is. Who is giving the orders? No one. The ants are self-organizing, according to Steven Johnson, whose bright book _Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software_ (Scribner) is obviously not just about ants. Ants are just an easy example. Johnson's book is full of satisfying analogies. Take your brain, for instance. Those neurons don't know anything. Each one is capably of firing when stimulated, and that's about it. "No individual neuron is sentient," Johnson writes, "and yet somehow the union of billions of neurons creates self-awareness." Adam Smith posited an "invisible hand" which set the prices in economic systems, some supply and demand force that was completely free of any sort of conscious human control (just as the slime cells didn't have a higher authority). It wasn't planned, it just happened because of the number of independent actors on the economic stage. The immune system possessed by each of us gets smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn't conscious and it has no memory. The host and hostess of that last party you went to didn't decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Though cities may have a government, no one has told them to set up offices in the center, and branch off into suburbs and malls around them, and no one designed individual neighborhoods to be havens for artists or for homosexuals. The silicon circuits in a handheld computer can't do much but flop on and off, but they can learn your handwriting with remarkable skill. Other electronic stupids at Amazon.com can tell from what you have ordered what might appeal to you in the future, and offer up "your" selections with much more skill than an ad designed for everyone could possibly do. Emergence is being used in video games, and undoubtedly will be a larger part of the software we interact with every day. There have, up to now, only been primitive and clumsy attempts to allow web sites and browsing to feed back on themselves in some emergent fashion to give users quicker access to just the site they had been long looking for. Couch potatoes, too, would make great ants, since there are so many of them and they could be simply connected with minimal feedback systems, with emergent miniseries and music videos as a result. When Johnson enters the ring as a prophet, one can only allow that his schemes might come to pass and we will have to wait and see. But in explaining a natural system (followed by a technological one) which has been present since before our neurons organized themselves but which has been appreciated by that organization only in the last few decades, Johnson displays enthusiasm and didactic skill. Some are hailing his book as a milestone on the path to the future, and maybe it is, but perhaps more important, it is an exhilarating and instructive course in a current trend of thought.
26 of 28 found the following review helpful:
Do yourself a favor and stop after Chapter 3Aug 23, 2005
By Leo Szumel
"gizmo geek"
The first chapter will pique your interest. The next two chapters will present interesting examples of emergent behavior. The remainder of the book will likely leave you feeling frustrated at the poor presentation and disappointed at the lack of follow-through on your expectations from chapter 1. The density of useful information drops precipitously as the book progresses, degrading to something at or below what you would expect to read in a blog (I'm serious). I must admit I haven't been able to finish the last chapter.
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