Thermodynamics of emergence : Langton's ant meets Boltzmann

Abstract

The current definitions of emergence have no effects in the context of artificial life that could convincingly be called `constructive'. They are rather descriptive labels or tests. In order to get towards recipes of generating emergence we need to know systemic characteristics that help during the design phase of artificial life systems and worlds. In this paper, we develop and discuss five hypotheses that are not meant to be irrevocable but rather thought-provoking. We introduce two modeling approaches for Langton's ant to clarify these hypotheses. Then we discuss general properties of systems, such as (ir-)reversibility, dependence on initial states, computation, discreetness, and undecidable properties of system states.