On Engineering and Emergence

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenge of designing self-organizing systems with emergent properties, emphasizing that scientific methods are essential for understanding and engineering complex patterns.

Contribution

It highlights the parallel between scientific inquiry and engineering of emergent systems, proposing that scientific methods are key to solving complex system design problems.

Findings

Scientific method is fundamental to engineering emergent systems

Designing simple rules for complex patterns is akin to scientific discovery

Emergence in systems can be understood through scientific principles

Abstract

The engineering and design of self-organizing systems with emergent properties is a long-standing problem in the field of complex and distributed systems, for example in the engineering of self-organizing Multi-Agent Systems. The problem of combining engineering with emergence - to find a simple rule for a complex pattern - equals the problem of science in general. Therefore the answers are similar, and the scientific method is the general solution to the problem of engineering complex systems.