Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!apple!bionet!agate!saab.stanford.edu!neon!Neon!jmc From: jmc@Gang-of-Four.usenet (John McCarthy) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Emergent properties (was: What AI is exactly) Message-ID: Date: 28 Sep 90 22:06:56 GMT References: <3894@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <26FA3460.1C7D@marob.masa.com> <3918@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <8581@helios.TAMU.EDU> Sender: news@Neon.Stanford.EDU (USENET News System) Organization: /u/jmc/.organization Lines: 8 In-Reply-To: jkrieger@bucsf.bu.edu's message of 27 Sep 90 21:24:07 GMT I'm suspicious that "emergent" is just a fancy term for the fact that any system has some properties that are not properties of the components. Let's take a trival example. Suppose we make an EXOR circuit out of AND gates and inverters. 3 AND gates and 3 inverters will do it. Does the fact that the circuit computes EXOR count as an emergent property, since none of the components computes EXOR? I suspect the users of "emergent" want to suggest something fancier. But what?