HW20: Chapter 19

(19.3) Why is it impossible to infer the emergent properties of a complex system from the properties of its components? 

A system, especially one that is complex, is composed of many intricate parts known as components, that can be composed of trivial properties on broad level. But its specific purpose as an complete unit is non-trival from a birds-eye perspective. It is equivalent to disassembling a machine designed for a specific purpose down to its nuts, bolts, and screws (and whatever is leftover), then asking someone what is the purpose of those screws. The person can identify the nuts, screws, and other individual items (which we will call properties of the components), and infer its purpose,  but in no sense will that person be able to determine what the overall functionality of the parts as a complete unit. 

HW19: Team Progress I

     Our team was working on an open source project based on the popular Pokemon game. The app itself allows users to generate the location and the duration of Pokemon in areas that they designated. The users would see the spawn locations on a map where they could further specify other credentials such the type of Pokemon they wish to generate on the map. After a few days of work and many dependencies and file configurations later we were able get the app to successively run. The next task was to identify test cases and test them within a driver. While working on this phase we noticed that the base of our project had been pulled from public use. After researching the issue we found that the developers had blocked scanning apps such as the PokemonGo Map from accessing its servers thus rendering the app useable. We are now searching for another open source project,  one that will not be at risk of being banned or blocked.