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 and  apply evolutionary and training techniques to “breed” and adaptively learn rather than construct programs manually. Through this emergent computing approach one can create system designs by leveraging the power of highly networked systems, such as neural networks, immune systems, or ecosystems. Programs can thus evolve or be trained to perform specific tasks in a bottom-up fashion rather than being explicitly coded. With the recent developments in large language models (LLMs), we will also explore the ’emergent’ aspects of generative AI (artificial intelligence) and other augmented intelligence systems.

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, large-language models, and augmented intelligence.

Next Course Offering:

This course will be offered again in Winter 2026.

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