Inspiring Explorations of Emergence

What do we mean by “Emergence”?

This course will give you insights into a new mindset for programming: through the study of emergent phenomena in natural, social, economic, and technological systems we can learn how to utilize emergence,  apply evolutionary techniques to “breed” rather than construct programs and create system designs, or leverage the power of highly networked systems, such as neural networks or immune systems . Programs can evolve or be trained to perform specific tasks in a bottom-up fashion rather than being manually coded. With the recent developments in large language models (LLMs), we will also explore the ’emergent’ aspects of generative AI (artificial intelligence).

Topics:

Topics covered will include: decentralized agent-based programming, evolutionary optimization, genetic algorithms, genetic programming, swarm intelligence, particle swarm optimization, connectionist systems, artificial neural networks.

Next Course Offering:

This course will be offered again in Winter 2024.

I am looking forward to spend an interesting semester with you.