Quantitative Emergence

Emergence can be defined as the formation of order from disorder based on self-organization. Humans -by looking at a self-organizing system - can decide intuitively whether emergence was taking place or not. To build self-organizing technical systems we need to automate the recognition of emergent behavior. In this paper we try to give a quantitative and practically usable definition of emergence. The presented theoretical approach is applied to an experimental environment, which shows emergent behavior. An observer/controller architecture with emergence-detectors is introduced. The proposed definition of emergence is discussed in comparison with Shannon's information theoretical approach