Or what ants, neurons, cities and software have in common.
No es fácil encontrar un libro que nos ayude a entender lo que Internet está suponiendo para la transmisión del conocimiento a nivel global, pues todo lo que se publica a diario sobre este tema tiene fecha de caducidad, son datos puntuales, y no entran en el fondo de los mecanismos que mueven este y otros fenómenos, cada día más habituales, fenómenos que tienen en común una estructura auto-organizada de forma opuesta a las jerarquías a las que estamos acostumbrados. Emerging systems fue escrito en 2001, y pese a ello la mayor parte de los temas tratados are still in force todayAmong other things because the author tries to make the phenomenon of the emergence of systems understandable with examples as disparate as: an anthill, the brain or the Manchester of the 19th century.
Steven Berlin Jonson is an American popular science writer. He has worked as a columnist for magazines such as Discover and Wired, and was a founding partner in the ezine Feed, and since 2006 has run the Outside-in community.
Sistemas emergentes es un libro de divulgación científica que nos explica fenómenos que conocemos pero no entendemos, como las social networks de Internet o la forma en la que se crean barrios dentro de las grandes ciudades. La explicación para este tipo de sistemas hay que buscarla de abajo a arriba en lugar de tratar de ver en ellos una estructura jerárquica; la definición de un sistema emergente o ascendente es aquel que no está controlado por un elemento en concreto o coordinador.
The author draws on various examples from zoology, programming and urban planning to illustrate, and devotes an entire chapter to debunking the myth of the queen ant. In ant colonies, far from what the myth of the queen ant claims, decisions are made individually by each ant based on a prior reading of the pheromone level of its environment. If an ant detects that the frequency of foraging ants is low (it has not crossed paths with any ants all morning), it will believe that the number of foraging ants is low and will therefore start foraging. Of course, this is a simple example to explain a very complex subject, but valid to introduce us to an exciting world about these self-organized systems.
In the last part of the book we go deeper into computer science, especially in evolutionary software, and it is there where the reader starts to find it difficult to follow the storyline, both because of the technical language used and because of the eight years that have passed since its publication, since computer science has changed a lot during this time.
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