Chess There's hardly a better
example of emergence than chess. Out of a game with fewer than two dozen rules
comes complexity to challenge the greatest minds on Earth. As the emergence
expert John Holland notes, if you have a game that ends after 50 moves and
offers 10 possible moves from any configuration along the way—a length of
game and number of options roughly equivalent to that found in chess—you
will have 1050 ways of playing the game, "a number," he
says, "which substantially exceeds the number of atoms in the whole of
our planet Earth."
