ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how space can contribute to emergence, through a range of concepts: the amount of memory and how that memory can be chunkedinto higher-level concepts, from simple data structures to entire virtual machine layers. Some properties and functionality of the resulting computation can be readily reduced to the underlying structures; others are more truly emergent, in that they are global properties of the entire system. One of the simplest computational structures is the finite-state machine (FSM). The system has a finite number of states and a state transition function defining which state to move to next, given a state and an input. An FSM starts in its initial state, and at each step the function determines which state to move to next, based on the next input item. The virtual machine is an important architectural concept in computer design. It is a software implementation of a computer that runs on another machine.
