p.11-12 In August of 2000, a Japanese scientist named Toshiyuki Nakagaki annouinced that he had trained an amoebalike organism called slime mold to find the shortest route through a maze... Without any apparent cognitive resources, the slime mold had "solved" the maze puzzle... For scientists trying to understand systems that use relatively simple components to build together higher-level intelligence, the slime mold may someday be seen as the equivalent of the finches and tortoises that Darwin observed on the Galapagos Islands.

p.18 What features do all these [self-organizing] systems share? In the simplest terms, they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent "executive branch." ...they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior. In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence.

p.18-19 Imagine a billiard table populated by semi-intelligent, motorized billiard balls that have been programmed to explore the space of the table and alter their movement patterns based on specific interactions with other balls... Such a system would define the most elemental form of complex behavior: a system with multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways, following local rules and oblivious to any higher-level instructions. But it wouldn't truly be considered emergent until those local interactions resulted in some kind of discernible macrobehavior.

p.20 Emergent complexity without adaptation is like the intricate crystals formed by a snowflake: it's a beautiful pattern, but it has no function.

p.20 How do you make a self-organizing system more adaptive?

p.21 For as long as complex organisms have been alive, they have lived under the laws of self-organization

p.121 Self-organizing systems use feedback to bootstrap themselves into a more orderly structure.

p.172 Hillis's stroke of genius was to force his miniprograms out of the ridges by introducing predators into the mix. Just as in real-world ecosystems, predators effectively raised the bar for evolved programs that became lazy because of their success.