Due to the nature of this project, we will have the opportunity to study patterns that develop from the interactions taking place between Sonar and the avatars which inhabit its space. These patterns might be seen visually within the swarm or they might appear as specific behaviors between the avatars and their interaction with the system. These types of patterns are sometimes known as emergent properties or emergent phenomena and this will be the focus of this first Sonar experiment.
Emergence has been defined by Professor Jeffrey Goldstein as..
“The arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems (Goldstein 2002)."
Any system operating in space and time may exhibit emergent properties which are loosely defined as irreducible phenomena arising through complex systems operating along more than one scale. Emergent properties can be observed and measured in living systems, chemical reactions, software programming, and just about any complex system operating in space and time. A common example of an emergent property is color; which arises from molecules as they reflect different energy levels.
“Elementary particles have no color; it is only when they are arranged in atoms that they absorb or emit specific wavelengths of light and can thus be said to have color (Wikipedia: Emergence)."
Here is another good description:
"An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales… why emergent behaviors occur include: intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback, known as interconnectivity. The emergent property itself may be either very predictable or unpredictable and unprecedented, and represent a new level of the system’s evolution. The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviours in the lower-level entities: they are irreducible. No physical property of an individual molecule of air would lead to one to think that a large collection of them will transmit sound."
Described by Wikipedia, the first order of emergence in nature contains, “structures that occur as a result of shape interactions only (for example, hydrogen bonds in water molecules lead to surface tension-an emergent property of water). Second order emergence structures involve shape interactions played out sequentially over time (for example, changing atmospheric conditions as a snowflake falls to the ground build upon and alter its form).” Third order emergence is described as being, "A consequence of shape, time, and heritable instructions." The 'heritable instructions' here are the behaviors exhibited by people acting through their avatars. For this reason, Sonar is ultimately dependent upon people engaging its dynamic form in a fluid interactive exchange format.
We will be examining third order emergence in this experiment as it provides the best opportunity for spontaneous social interaction as well as the study of emergent patterns through architectural/avatar interaction.
