
xviii Preface
This book is about self-organization, which is closely related to emergent
computation. Self-organization involves simple processes that lead to complex
results, and the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. As Stephen Wolfram
(1994) said, “It is possible to make things of great complexity out of things that
are very simple. There is no conservation of simplicity.”
It is about complex adaptive systems, a term that describes nonlinear systems com-
prising the interaction of numerous adaptive elements, or entities. The concepts of
self-organization and complexity are related, as we discuss later.
This book is not an exhaustive