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The physical, biological and social domains are full of complex systems that emerge spontaneously from the interactions between the simpler elements existing in nature or in society. In recent years, though, with the proliferation of man-made artifacts, Information Technology and networking, many artificial systems have acquired a large number of elements and started to emerge collective complex phenomena. For people unaware of the complexity emergence mechanisms, it came as a surprise that a bunch of man-made artifacts would develop a mind of themselves to the level that their behavior couldn't be described, understood and utilized with the usual engineering methods.

Some examples of behavior in such systems are:

• ·growth and information flow dynamics in computer networks,
• ·the multi-agents ecology,
• ·the world-wide-web contents evolution,
• ·commerce arenas filled with negotiation agents and
• ·traffic networks.
• All of these phenomena have in common the following facts:
• They are all built from or operate on multitudes of similar components which interact intensely with each other.

The technological/research field in which the components were initially designed and developed is not adequate to analyze, study and manipulate the overall system. For example, when a computer network grows so much that it can be looked at as a statistical ensemble, understanding the computer's hardware architecture or its operating system design is just not relevant to the task of identifying emerging collective qualities of the network.

While there is immense difference in the detailed structure of the elementary components composing each of these systems, their complex collective features can be shown to be analogous. In fact it doesn't even matter whether the basic elements are man-made or natural ones.

Next: The Social life of computers
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