Blessed are the Geeks!

I think those Computer Nerd-types might be (unwittingly) onto something here. Sorry if you're one of them. Actually, I must confess to being one of you - I first read about this kind of thing a few years back during my Linguistics postgrad. Anyhow, while I was getting this blog ready for its first post I came across the following two commments on some Computer Science websites. (type "emergent" in Google and you get the emergent church websites first. Hit the "UK Only" button and you get computer science pages. Shame.)

From UMIST, Manchester: "The centralised control of complex processes has long been known to be self-restricting. Communication bandwidth expand at ever increasing rates and induced minor non-linearities create catastrophic effects - there is an inherent fragility in any central-executive-driven system. Distributed computing was, and remains, an attempt to overcome these problems. Though much progress has been made, such systems can still exhibit serious limitations (e.g., high communication bandwidths) and undesired emergent behaviour."

From beart.org.uk:
"What can emergent systems do that other systems can’t? They are robust and resilient. There is no single-point of failure, so if a single unit fails, becomes lost or is stolen, the system still works. They are well-suited to the messy real world. Human-engineered systems may be “optimal” but often require a lot of effort to design and are fragile in the face of changing conditions. Importantly, they don’t need to have complete knowledge/understanding to achieve a goal (e.g. social systems in warehousing). They find a reasonable solution quickly and then optimise. In the real world, time matters - decisions need to be taken while they are still relevant. Traditional computer algorithms tend to not produce a useful result until they are complete (which may be too late, e.g. if you're trying to avoid an oncoming obstacle)."

Is there something in this dark corner of geekdom that the church needs to hear? Comments?