Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model
SIGGRAPH '87 Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Intelligence without representation
Artificial Intelligence
Randomized algorithms
Artificial Life II
The Art of Computer Programming, 2nd Ed. (Addison-Wesley Series in Computer Science and Information
The Art of Computer Programming, 2nd Ed. (Addison-Wesley Series in Computer Science and Information
On the Morality of Artificial Agents
Minds and Machines
Abstraction, Refinement And Proof For Probabilistic Systems (Monographs in Computer Science)
Abstraction, Refinement And Proof For Probabilistic Systems (Monographs in Computer Science)
Ethics and Information Technology
TASE '07 Proceedings of the First Joint IEEE/IFIP Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering
Emergence is coupled to scope, not level: Research Articles
Complexity - Complex Systems Engineering
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Formal Development of Self-organising Systems
ATC '09 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Autonomic and Trusted Computing
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The complex systems lying at the heart of ensemble engineering exhibit emergent behaviour: behaviour that is not explicitly derived from the functional description of the ensemble components at the level of abstraction at which they are provided. Emergent behaviour can be understood by expanding the description of the components to refine their functional behaviour; but that is infeasible in specifying ensembles of realistic size (although it is the main implementation method) since it amounts to consideration of an entire implementation. This position paper suggests an alternative. `Emergence' is clarified using levels of abstraction and a method proposed for specifying ensembles by augmenting the functional behaviour of its components with a system-wide `emergence predicate' accounting for emergence. Examples are given to indicate how conformance to such a specification can be established. Finally an approach is suggested to Ensemble Engineering, the relevant elaboration of Software Engineering. On the way, the example is considered of an ensemble composed of artificial agents and a case made that there emergence can helpfully be viewed as ethics in the absence of free will.