Thoughts on old research question

Back in undergrad (July 2010!) my professor, Dr. Babcock, posed the following question in order to help expand my narrow focus:

The really interesting question is how does making the individual rules more complex affect the aggregate behavior patterns (or does the society no longer have patterns).

As I am studying MAL, swarms and emergence I am thoroughly intrigued with this idea.  I am hoping that with a better mathematical framework for understanding emergence and swarms I can formulate an answer.

Based on nature patterns generally emerge from either coordination or cooperation.  So, a better question might be can coordination and cooperation be so far abstracted due to the complexity of the rules that aggregate behavior patterns do not emerge?  Then at that point we may still observe emergent behavior only due to some more complex social notion.  So, what is it and how can we observe it :).

 

*On a side note: Since I found that email, I noticed the date I sent, July 2 2010, and he replied July 6 2010.  I really had a cool professor to take his time to reply even around July 4.

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