2023/08/20 by Hervé Zwirn, Zwirn, Hervé
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computability, Logic, AI Algorithms #Computational Complexity (cs.CC) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2308.10912
openalex publication_date 2023/08/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Emergence is a pregnant property in various fields. It is the fact for a phenomenon to appear surprisingly and to be such that it seems at first sight that it is not possible to predict its apparition. That is the reason why it has often been said that emergence is a subjective property relative to the observer. Some mathematical systems having very simple and deterministic rules nevertheless show emergent behavior. Studying these systems shed a new light on the subject and allows to define a new concept, computational irreducibility, which deals with behaviors that even though they are totally deterministic cannot be predicted without simulating them. Computational irreducibility is then a key for understanding emergent phenomena from an objective point of view that does not need the mention of any observer.