The Complexity Turn

A flock of birds sweeps across the sky. Like a well-choreographed dance troupe, the birds veer to the left in unison. . . . The flock is organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. Bird flocks are not the only things that work that way. Ant colonies, highway traffic, market economies, immune systems – in all of these systems, patterns are determined . . . by local interactions among decentralised components. (Resnick,...