Multiagent Systems

The futility of emergence is a fun rant on the overuse of the word emergence as an explanation in an of itself:

I have lost track of how many times I have heard people say, "Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon!" as if that explained intelligence.

I, on the other hand, have never read a research paper that makes such a claim or, in fact, a paper that uses emergence as an explanation. All research papers I've read use it in the standard form of saying "this global behavior emerges from the simple behaviors of my agents". Still, I do see the term abused in the popular press by some reporters and ignorant bloggers. There is a small subset of people that like to attribute mystical properties to emergence.