A new book proposes a mathematical framework for explaining how organised collective behaviour emerges from interactions among independently acting participants.
In Emergence as Harmony: Mathematical Principles of Self-Organization, Complexity, and Collective Behavior, Columbia University engineering professor Venkat Venkatasubramanian develops an approach called statistical teleodynamics. The framework combines statistical mechanics, game theory and the study of goal-directed agents. Examples span bacterial behaviour, ant colonies, mussel aggregations, bird flocks, ecological organisation, social segregation, economic inequality and artificial intelligence. The author argues that these apparently unrelated systems may share mathematical principles governing how competing individual objectives produce organised collective outcomes.
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/emergence-as-harmony/9780231224574/
