Ten Questions about Emergence

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of emergence in self-organizing distributed systems, posing key questions, providing preliminary insights, and identifying fundamental limits to understanding and engineering such systems.

Contribution

It presents ten central questions about emergence, offers initial answers, and defines four basic limits of self-organization in large-scale systems.

Findings

Identifies four fundamental limits: size, place, complexity, and combinatorial.

Provides preliminary answers to core questions about emergence.

Highlights challenges and open issues in engineering self-organizing systems.

Abstract

Self-Organization is of growing importance for large distributed computing systems. In these systems, a central control and manual management is exceedingly difficult or even impossible. Emergence is widely recognized as the core principle behind self-organization. Therefore the idea to use both principles to control and organize large-scale distributed systems is very attractive and not so far off. Yet there are many open questions about emergence and self-organization, ranging from a clear definition and scientific understanding to the possible applications in engineering and technology, including the limitations of both concepts. Self-organizing systems with emergent properties are highly desirable, but also very challenging. We pose ten central questions about emergence, give preliminary answers, and identify four basic limits of self-organization: a size limit, a place limit, a complexity limit and finally a combinatorial limit.