Quote:"Emergent behavior is behavior that looks complex and/or purposeful to the observer but is actually derived spontaneously from fairly simple rules."

Quote:"Recently, emergent behaviors have become crucial in game design and implementation, where it is important to increase game’s intelligence by adding more unpredictability into the game. Chris Crawford in his book [6], states a game he would like to build, “Attack of Cellular Automata”. He quotes that it might be fun in fighting a war with cellular automata. The cellular automata have emergent behaviors, which gives rise to interesting game-play. In this paper, we report our approach to realize some of the above ideas using conceptual framework of cellular automata. Sections II and III briefly review use of Emergent Behavior (EB) and Cellular Automata (CA) for games. Section IV reviews open source Java applet MJCell v. 1.50. Our framework for software architecture for developing CA games is described in Section V. Section VI discusses our game “Mr. Froggy”, and Section VII gives concluding remarks.

II. EMERGENT BEHAVIOR AND GAMES “Emergent behavior is that which cannot be predicted through analysis at any level simpler than that of the system as a whole… Emergent behavior, by definition, is what’s left after everything else has been explained” (Dyson & George, 1997 [9]). Emergence is also defined as the action of simple rules combining to produce complex results (Rollings et al., 2003 [17]). A game with emergent properties can create an illusion of intelligence to a game AI (Scott, 2002 [19]); it can make even the game designers surprised on how the game runs, how the game evolves, and even they do not know the best strategy to win the game. Emergence has become a popular buzzword over the past decade (Kreimeier, 2000 [12]). Kreimeier [12] reports that Marc LeBlanc attempted to make a case for emergent complexity as a possible source for "fun." In his view, such emergence creates larger spaces to explore, offering the player more features to discover and more challenges to meet"

Quote:One nice side effect demonstrating the intrinsic power of such a straightforward approach to AI can be seen in something called "emergent behavior." A developer faced with coding a complex AI can instead break it down into smaller pieces. Rather than having to code thousands of rules for every conceivable situation that could arise in a game, lower-level behaviors are coded individually and then linked in a decision-making hierarchy. The interaction between these low-level behaviors can cause higher-level, more "intelligent" behaviors to emerge without any explicit programming. This is the basis behind flocking, an AI technology that seeks to emulate the behavior of large groups of animals, such as flocks of birds or schools of fish. No one member of a flock actually knows anything about the motion of the flock, and yet through individual actions their motions are coordinated and fluid. Flocking has found its way into a number of first-person shooters and RPGs as the basis of sort of artificial life, another form of AI technology seeing more use in games.

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
I've been a game programmer for 10 years at 4 different companies and we all consider emergent behavior to be what InnocuousFox says.

Quote:Oh no, we must not use an improper definition!