RE: Development: A Structured Problem Area?

On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 18:37, Derek Richardson wrote:

> I am unclear about how software exhibits emergent behavior. From my
> understanding of the complexity literature, emergence can occur when
> many independent agents with simple rules interact; the Game of Life
> being an example.

As soon as you get a number of independent agents interacting, you can
get emergence.  It can happen in social situations, obviously (a team is
a collection of independent agents interacting).  But it can also
happen--by accident or design--in software systems.  Programs like the
Game of Life do it by design.  Programs with highly-coupled, interacting
pieces may begin to show emergence by accident (and not on the happy
end).  

Have you ever witnessed a system that started acting "bizarrely"? That
is, started exhibiting inexplicable bugs that turned out to be caused by
the unforseeen interaction of multiple components?  That's not just a
bug, it's an emergent bug.  At least I would certainly classify it as
such.

> Thanks for the heads-up on Lester. That sounds like a good companion to
> the Dreyfuses and Schon. According to a recent paper of H. Dreyfus',
> there may be a new book coming out from them on the skill model soon,
> updated to cover neural networks and other advances since 1986.

I spoke with Dreyfus sometime last year, and he was really hopped up on
the neural network angle.  That's actually less useful for me; I'm more
concerned with the human angle, not the computer angle.  Still I'm sure
it will be interesting reading.

In the meantime, we still need to convince the 40% of software teams in
the US who *don't* use version control that they should, and likewise
the 70% who don't do daily builds.  I *do* know of some books they
should read :-)

/\ndy



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