Emergence

In an earlier post I was complaining about the Washington Area traffic. The nation's capital is also the site of capital traffic jams. Highways are shut down due to construction or all but one lane is blocked off and a long line of cars are burning gas and waiting patiently to get through. Very quickly like water pressure finds the weak point in a submarine's hull, the traffic finds an exit to some side road that runs through a quiet residential neighborhood. Soon all the cars are pouring through roads that are single lane wide and riddled with stop signs and a 25 mile an hour limit.


The careful well planned highway capable of carrying six lanes of traffic at 60 miles or more an hour lies idle as the side roads are choked with traffic far beyond their carrying capacity. What is happening here? The drivers are exhibiting emergent behavior. If one were to magically wave a wand and expand the by lanes to turn them into highways, they would soon become the "new normal" until the old highway comes back into service. Maybe the old highway may never be used again.

I am a fan of the late author Michael Crichton. Only now as I am slowly beginning to understand emergent phenomena, I am beginning to realize that emergent behaviors are a thread that run through most of his books - be it a virus mutation in the Andromeda Strain, the adaptive learning of the human brain in The Terminal Man or the emergent behavior of prehistoric animals brought back to life in Jurassic Park.

I look at nature and I see emergence everywhere. The termite hill in the distance is a product of emergent building as are ant hills, bee hives, and bird's nests. Did they have a static plan when the insects and animals who built them started? Or did the hill or hive or nest get built as they went along? Did the icicle always grow at the same place (crystalline structures are fractal, but the overall shape of the crystal may be a result of lopsided growth).

Emergent behavior, speaking loosely is an unplanned evolution of behavior that results from many factors, often unanticipated. Emergent behavior defeats the static planning and the estimation of dynamic calculations that form the bedrock of architecture work. We as architects are trying to plan the various parameters of a system based on assumptions of growth and evolution and capacity limits and topological structures that reflect the world as we understand it today and our assumptions for the next say, three, five or even ten years. Emergent behaviors tend to wreak havoc on this planned and organized way of being. Emergent behaviors are opportunistic. Emergent behaviors are driven by unforeseen constraints, an urge to get ahead, impatience with the static status quo and a host of other motivating factors.

Emergent behaviors seem to exacerbate when there is an explicit disconnect between the "swarm" and the resources. I had observed behavioral differences between customers at fast food restaurants in Germany where you have to ask and pay for ketchup and jam versus customers in the United States, where these condiments are set out in piles of packets for customers to help themselves.

I am looking forward to doing more research on "emergent architectures" and the phenomenon of emergence as it relates to systems engineering to develop ways to manage the evolution of architecture topologies to match emergent behaviors rather than stay static with the assumptions of yesterday ill suited to the behaviors of today. The area of cloud computing is a domain that is akin to the fast food example I have mentioned earlier.