At times hilariously outdated (read the author marvel at digital ants walking across a screen as opposed to today’s ChatGPT and deep fakes) yet always applicable to today’s world. It helps the reader form an intuitive understanding of how the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. (Eg anthills or slime molds behaving as discrete organisms that appear to reason and plan.) Anyone interested in any processes or abstractions (computational, biological, anthropological) would enjoy this book.

May be a bit dated now but one of the few books that changed my worldview.

Considering that ants acting on their own appear to have intelligence when observed as a colony, emergence is when actions on a small level emerge as another concept when observed on a higher scale. The author applies this to human cities where merchants acting on their own appear to create cities that were organized in a certain way, and do games like SimCity emulate this? Considering that intelligence emerges from billions of tiny human neurons, will computer intelligence also emergence from billions of tiny transistors? Is empathy and anticipated actions related to this?

The author shows how to apply Ant Colony Optimization to the Traveling Salesman Problem, and I was hoping that he would address other Soft Computing (emergence) algorithms such as Self Organizing Maps, Swarm Intelligence, Genetic Algorithms, and Artificial Immune Systems. Even without these, he still did a great job exploring the concept of emergence.

An excellent introduction to networks and emergence. The book has aged very little in 20yrs, if at all. A surprising number of the prediction/hunches of the author are now realized, and the rest don't seem impossible in the future.

Some of the ideas are not as fleshed out as they could be, and there are assumptions that the author doesn't address. To get to the main ideas, you will have to skim the paragraphs to avoid any repetitive story-telling. If you are looking for formal explanations instead of descriptions of emergence, you will not find it here.