title: Patty Jenkins

text: Patricia Lea Jenkins (born July 24, 1971) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. She has directed the feature films "Monster" (2003), "Wonder Woman" (2017), and "Wonder Woman 1984" (2020). For the film "Monster", she won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature and the Franklin J. Schaffner Award of the American Film Institute (AFI). For the pilot episode of the series "The Killing" (2011), she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination and the Directors Guild of America award for Best Directing in a Drama Series. In 2017, she occupied the seventh place for "Time"s Person of the Year.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: Jenkins was born in Victorville, California, to William T. Jenkins, a U.S. Air Force officer and fighter pilot who earned a Silver Star in the Vietnam War, and Emily Roth, who later worked in San Francisco as an environmental scientist. Her older sister is Elaine Roth, her younger sister is Jessica Jenkins Murphy.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: She spent her early childhood moving frequently due to her father's military service. Having lived briefly in Thailand and Germany, the family eventually settled in Lawrence, Kansas. When she was seven years old, her father died during a NATO mock dogfight at the age of 31. During a road trip from Kansas to San Francisco, her mother dropped Jenkins and her sister off at a movie theater, where they watched the original "Superman" starring Christopher Reeve. Jenkins found the film inspiring, and the experience sparked an interest in pursuing filmmaking as a career.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: She completed kindergarten through her junior year of high school while living in Lawrence. Her mom then moved the family to Washington D.C. where Patty completed her senior year of high school. She received her undergraduate degree in Painting from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1993, and a master's degree in directing from the American Film Institute's AFI Conservatory in 2000. While a student at AFI, Jenkins, an avid fan of the films of Pedro Almodóvar, made the 2001 short film "Velocity Rules", that she describes as a cross between a superhero film and Almodóvar's tone about an accident-prone housewife.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: Beginning in junior high school, Jenkins took interest in photography, painting, and screen-printing. At age 20, while interning at a commercial production company, she heeded a suggestion that she could receive film training if she worked on set for free. After doing so for some months, Jenkins advanced to second assistant camera and focus puller, then spent eight years as a cameraperson. While shooting a Michael Jackson music video, her director of photography recommended that she attend the American Film Institute to learn directing. She later made a superhero short film that played the AFI Fest. There she met Brad Wyman, who later introduced her to producer Donald Kushner, leading to her directing her first feature film, "Monster" (2003).


title: Patty Jenkins

text: Patty Jenkins started her career with "Just Drives" (2001) as her first film as director, she would later follow it up with "Velocity Rules" (2001). This film follows a housewife who finds out she is a superhero and then has to choose between a life of excitement and glamour or her husband. The film ended up being a Recipient of the Warner Brothers Production Grant.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: This ended up moving her towards the film "Monster" (2003); at first she tried to get producer Brad Wyman to direct, but under his advice she ended up writing the script herself. Jenkins ended up writing to the film's subject, serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was a street prostitute who went on a 1989–1990 murder spree of seven of her male clients, and was at the time was on death row. Wuornos was initially distrustful of Jenkins but on the night before her execution, left Jenkins all of her personal letters which convinced Jenkins that she was the only one who could direct the film.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: With a budget of $1.5 million and Charlize Theron attached to the film, "Monster" ended up being a commercial and critical success, earning $64.2 million and earning Theron her first and only Oscar to date for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Noted film critic Roger Ebert ranked "Monster" 1st on his list of the best films of 2003 and later in 2009, ranked it 3rd on the list of the best films of the decade. For this film, Jenkins won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature and the Franklin J. Schaffner Award of the American Film Institute (an award for outstanding graduates of the AFI Conservatory), and also was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Screenplay.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: After the success of the film "Monster", Jenkins was approached by former United States Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager to develop a film about his life. When that project did not reach fruition, she attempted to make a Ryan Gosling movie titled "I Am Superman", a film with no relation to the DC Comics character, but development ended when she became pregnant. Jenkins spent the next decade working in television.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: In 2011 she directed one segment in the made-for-television anthology film "Five". Jenkins received an Emmy nomination because of her work on the film. Jenkins directed many ads and TV programs like episodes of "Arrested Development" and "Entourage". She received an Emmy nomination again for the directing work done on AMC's "The Killing" pilot. In October 2011, she was hired to direct "", the first sequel to 2011 superhero film "Thor", but left the project after less than two months due to creative differences. In 2014, she was attached to "Sweetheart", a film about a female assassin, but that film was never made.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: In 2015, Jenkins signed on as director for the DC Extended Universe film "Wonder Woman", with a screenplay by Allan Heinberg and a story co-written by Heinberg, Zack Snyder and Jason Fuchs, and starring Gal Gadot. The film was released in June 2017 and gave Jenkins the biggest domestic opening for a female director, surpassing previous record holder "Fifty Shades of Grey" by Sam Taylor-Johnson. With this film, Jenkins also became the first female director of an American studio superhero movie. The film was acclaimed by both critics and audiences and grossed over $800 million worldwide, exceeding box office original predictions. "Wonder Woman" eventually became the highest-grossing film directed by a woman, surpassing previous record holder "Mamma Mia!" by Phyllida Lloyd. However, in 2019, "Frozen II" directed by Jennifer Lee (with Chris Buck) and "Captain Marvel", directed by Anna Boden (with Ryan Fleck) became number 1 and 2 respectively, dropping Wonder Woman and Jenkins to number 3.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: While promoting "Wonder Woman", Jenkins mentioned that her next project would likely be a limited television series developed with her husband. This project was later revealed as a horror series titled "Riprore" to premiere on the video-on-demand service Shudder. In July 2017, the US cable network TNT announced Jenkins would direct the premiere of a six-episode television drama, "I Am the Night", written by her author husband Sam Sheridan and featuring her "Wonder Woman" star Chris Pine. She additionally served as an executive producer.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: In September 2017, "Variety" reported Jenkins would return to direct "Wonder Woman 2." However, on MTV's "Happy, Sad, Confused" podcast, Jenkins revealed that she considered walking away from the sequel due to salary dispute between her and Warner Bros. On December 6, 2017, Jenkins was named by "Time" magazine as a 7th runner-up for "Time" Person of the Year.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: "Wonder Woman 1984" was scheduled to be released by Warner Bros. Pictures in the United States on June 5, 2020, but, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the release was delayed until December 25, 2020, worldwide. It had originally been scheduled for November 1, 2019; unlike the first film, the sequel received a mixed critical reception and was a box office failure. She has been negotiating the terms of her contract with Warner Brothers for an estimated 7 to 9 million dollars, which would be a record breaking salary for a female filmmaker. She signed on to the first film with no guarantee of directing a second film, but envisioned the second one during the making of "Wonder Woman", which turned out to benefit her greatly. When she was signed on to do the second film, she had the ability to get a much higher salary than she would have if she had been signed on to do both films from the beginning. Her goal with her negotiations were to make sure she would get the same salary that her male counterparts would be getting for doing this movie and she seems to have succeeded.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: In October 2020, it was revealed that Gal Gadot and Jenkins will be teaming up again for the film "Cleopatra". The film will star Gadot as the titular Cleopatra, the historical pharaoh of ancient Egypt, with Jenkins as the director. In December 2021, Jenkins dropped out of the film, but remained as a producer, to instead focus on a third "Wonder Woman" film and the "Star Wars" spin-off film "Rogue Squadron".


title: Patty Jenkins

text: In November 2020, a spin off film set in the "Wonder Woman" universe focusing on the Amazons of Themyscira was confirmed to be in early development. Jenkins will not return to direct the film but cowrote the script with writer Geoff Johns. In 2021, Warner Bros. announced a third installment of the "Wonder Woman" franchise with Jenkins attached to write and direct. However, in December 2022, it was reported by "The Hollywood Reporter" that Jenkins' third film would not be moving forward after all and was considered to be "dead in its current incarnation", as the film did not fit with the newly appointed DC Studios heads' plans for the DC Extended Universe.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: In December 2020, Disney announced that Jenkins is hired to direct "Rogue Squadron", a "Star Wars" spin-off film inspired by the group of starfighter pilots of the same name. The film was scheduled to be released on December 22, 2023. Jenkins will be the first female director to helm a "Star Wars" film but is not the first female director within the overall franchise. In June 2021, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Matthew Robinson had been hired by Lucasfilm to write the script. In November 2021, it was reported that the film's production had been delayed due to scheduling conflicts with other projects Jenkins was developing. In September 2022, Disney removed "Rogue Squadron" from their release schedule.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: Jenkins, "Wonder Woman" actresses Gal Gadot and Lynda Carter, DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson, and U.N. Under-Secretary General Cristina Gallach appeared at the United Nations on October 21, 2016, the 75th anniversary of the first appearance of Wonder Woman, to mark the character's designation by the United Nations as its "Honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls". The gesture was intended to raise awareness of UN Sustainable Development Goal No. 5, which seeks to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls by 2030. The decision was met with protests from UN staff members who stated in their petition to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that the character is "not culturally encompassing or sensitive", and served to objectify women. As a result, the character was stripped of the designation, and the project ended December 16.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: In the film "Monster", Jenkins explored the issues of morality and femininity. In "Wonder Woman", Jenkins suggests that the audience experiences the journey of the lead character Diana Prince through Diana's eyes. Diana is portrayed as the universal human character that the audience never experiences from the outside. Jenkins suggests that the major theme of the film is the idea that there are no other villains than humans themselves. She mentions how she was influenced by "Superman" and how that is incorporated in her own superhero film.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: Connie Nielsen (who plays Hippolyta in the Wonder Woman franchise) said that Jenkins fought for feminist themes to be included in the Wonder Woman film and rejected the idea of including a controversial origin story for the Amazons which portrayed them as victims rather than warriors.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: Some of Jenkins' mentors and influencers include Gary Ross, Kathryn Bigelow and Steve Perry. Steve Perry was a musical consultant on her film "Monster"; she mentions that she often likes to discuss the process of making music with musicians like Perry. The organization and structure of music, according to Jenkins, has a lot of parallels to theatre and drama. As a director, she uses this rhythm to direct the delivery of dialogues.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: In 2007, Jenkins married Sam Sheridan, a former firefighter and the author of the book "A Fighter's Heart". They have a son and reside in Santa Monica, California.


title: Patty Jenkins

text: In 2004, for her work on "Monster", she won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature and the Franklin J. Schaffner Award of the American Film Institute (an award for outstanding graduates of the AFI Conservatory). In 2011, Jenkins received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for the pilot of "The Killing". She received two nominations at the 2012 Directors Guild of America Awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement, one for Dramatic Series for "The Killing" and the other for Movies for Television/Mini-Series for "Five"; she won the former.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is a first-person shooter survival horror video game developed by GSC Game World and published by THQ in 2007 following a long development. The game is set in an alternative reality, where a second disaster of mysterious origin occurred at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, causing strange changes in the area around it. The game features a non-linear storyline and includes role-playing gameplay elements such as trading and two-way communication with non-player characters.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: In the game, the player assumes the identity of the Marked One, an amnesiac man trying to find and kill the mysterious Strelok within the Zone, a forbidden territory surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It is set after a fictitious second Chernobyl disaster, which further contaminated the surrounding area with radiation, and caused strange otherworldly changes in local fauna, flora, and the laws of physics. The background and some terminology of the game are borrowed from the Russian novella "Roadside Picnic" and its film adaptation "Stalker".


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: A prequel, "", was released in 2008. A sequel, "", followed in 2010. There are also multiple fan remakes trying to restore the cut content from the original version of the game like "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost Remake".


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." takes place in an area called the Zone, which is based on the real-life Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and partly on the settings of the source material, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's science fiction novella "Roadside Picnic" and Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Stalker", as well as the latter's subsequent novelization by the original authors. The Zone encompasses roughly 30 square kilometers and features a slice of the Chernobyl area extending south from Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant; geographical changes for artistic license include moving the city of Pripyat into this area (it is actually to the north-west of the power station), although the city itself is directly modeled on its real-life counterpart, albeit smaller in size, and features in-game recreations of many actual locations from the city. The term Stalkers was also used for the scientists and engineers who explored the interior of the Chernobyl sarcophagus after its hasty construction in 1986. In addition, the Zone is also a term used to refer to the 30 kilometer Exclusion Zone around the power plant.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: In the game's backstory, after the initial Chernobyl disaster, attempts were made to repopulate the area, primarily with scientists and military personnel. However, in 2006, almost 20 years after the first incident, a mysterious second disaster occurred, killing or mutating most of the inhabitants. "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." begins years later, after people have begun coming to the Zone in search of money, valuable artifacts, and scientific information. In keeping with the post-nuclear decay within the Zone, extreme radiation has caused mutations among animals and plants in the area. As a result of the second disaster, the Zone is also littered with dangerous small areas of altered physics, known as anomalies. Explorers and scavengers operating within the Zone, known as Stalkers, possess an anomaly detector, which emits warning beeps of a varying frequency depending on their proximity to an anomaly.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl" is primarily a first-person shooter survival horror video game, but it also features many RPG elements. The player does not gain additional abilities or statistics like most RPGs (though the player does level through game play from "novice" to "expert" which has slight effects on the ability to aim accurately), but is instead allowed to attach artifacts which can increase or decrease player attributes. Artifacts found within the Zone have both positive and negative effects except for some rare artifacts which have only positive attributes.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: There are a large number of items in the game, so the player has customization choices which are constrained primarily by how much exploring they do. The game also attempts to blend the story and character interaction which are commonly associated with RPGs. However, conversation branches are extremely limited and do not significantly influence the course of the game, aside from accepting or declining missions.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: The Zone itself is a large and varied area, consisting of wilderness, human settlements, and several heavily guarded military bases. However, the game world is not a true contiguous world, but rather 18 different maps separated by loading screens. Transfer from one area to another can only be accomplished at certain specific passageways; wire fences and extreme radiation levels block the player from attempting to cross the map in any other area.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: Creatures within The Zone are vastly different from their real-world counterparts: dogs, boars, crows, and many more. Additionally, some areas contain mutated humans who have become affected by the so-called Brain Scorcher. Artificial intelligence of wildlife is highly developed and presents many realistic behaviors, such as fights over food and pack mentality, which can be observed in non-scripted events. The game engine was designed so that animal behavior is calculated even if the player is in a different part of the Zone.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: There are several different variations of anomaly, each one having a unique impact upon those who cross its path. They can be potentially deadly to the player and the NPCs, delivering electric shocks, or pulling them into the air and crushing them. Most anomalies produce visible air or light distortions and their extent can be determined by throwing bolts (of which the player carries an infinite supply) to trigger them. Artifacts are found scattered throughout the Zone, often near clusters of anomalies. As well as being traded for money, a number of artifacts can be worn so that they provide certain benefits and detriments (for example, increasing a stalker's resistance to gunfire while also contaminating him with small amounts of radiation) although certain rarer artifacts provide benefits without any negative effects.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: The game does not feature controllable vehicles (although vehicles are programmed in the game code, they are not available without the use of a third party modification, and even if added, they are not entirely stable, as a single knife slash can destroy it completely) and thus players are required to go from place to place on foot. A sprint option using a limited stamina bar can be used to temporarily increase the player's rate of movement, though this is reduced by the weight of objects the player is carrying, and weapons cannot be fired while sprinting. It is possible to sprint indefinitely by using artifacts and keeping below a certain weight limit (50 kg); however, it is impossible to sprint with certain weapons (e.g. RPG-7 and SVD).


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: Radioactive contamination caused by the nuclear incidents at Chernobyl occurs in specific invisible patches throughout the Zone. Although most areas are not contaminated, areas near abandoned construction equipment that was used in the post-accident clean-up, certain military vehicular wreckage and a variety of other locations create fields of radiation of varying intensity and size, some of which cannot be passed through without the proper protective equipment and anti-contaminant agents. The equipment is simplified into various sets of armor that have different levels of radiation protection. Additional radiation resistance may be conferred by some artifacts, and radiation sickness may be treated by medication or by consuming vodka.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: When the player enters a highly irradiated area, they will begin to receive radiation poisoning. During this time, a radiation icon appears on the screen and fades through from green to yellow to red, signifying the strength of the poisoning, which grows the longer the player remains present in the affected areas. The stronger the poisoning, the faster the player's health decreases. Unless the player dies from damage caused by radiation poisoning, there are no permanent effects from contracting it other than health loss. However, radiation will persist and continue to drain health until either radiation medication or a substantial amount of vodka is consumed. Radiation can primarily be avoided by wearing certain artifacts that neutralize radiation or more advanced suits that will effectively protect the player from radiation.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: In much the same way radiation works as a gameplay mechanic, the player will occasionally become hungry during their travels. During this state, an icon of a crossed fork and spoon will appear. Consuming in-game food items returns the player state from hungry to not hungry, which removes the negative impact on stamina that the hunger status gives. However, if one ignores eating, it will result in the death of the player in a certain amount of time.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: As with radiation and hunger, bleeding is another state of detriment which the player must try to avoid or manage while playing the game. Bleeding occurs when the player sustains certain kinds of injuries of certain severity (such as being shot or stabbed). The player will lose the amount of health determined by the landed blow and will continue to lose small amounts of health as they hemorrhage. Bleeding can sometimes stop on its own, but the player can prevent further bleeding by applying bandages or using first aid kits, thereby preventing further health loss.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: "Shadow of Chernobyl" offers 7 different endings based on the player's actions. The ending below is considered canon in the series.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: The game opens with lightning striking a vehicle, causing it to crash. The player character is the sole survivor and wakes up in a local black-market trader's bunker. The player suffers from amnesia and has only two clues to his identity. The first is a tattoo of the acronym "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." and the second is a PDA, with the entry "Kill Strelok". Sidorovich, the trader, gives them the nickname "Marked One". The Marked One performs several tasks for Sidorovich as payment for saving his life. Through these missions and new contacts, the player discovers clues to Strelok's possible location. These bring them deeper into the Zone and provide more details about Strelok and his team. Along the way, the Marked One begins to have flashes of his lost memory.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: To progress further into the Zone, the player must disable a device known as the Miracle Machine. This device is man-made and causes those within its range to lose their mind, becoming zombies. While disabling the device, the Marked One finds a clue that leads to Doc, a member of Strelok's team. A trap injures the player, who is then rescued by Doc. He tells the Marked One about a monolithic artifact known as the Wish Granter, located at the center of the Zone. This artifact is sought after by all the factions and a group known as Monolith protects it. Doc also implies that the player is in fact Strelok, before departing.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: New leads point to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant as the location of the Wish Granter. A second, larger Miracle Machine, named the Brain Scorcher blocks the path to Pripyat. After disabling this device, the player can travel into Pripyat and through to the plant. With the path open, Pripyat becomes a warzone as different factions fight for control. The player must fight Monolith fanatics and the military to reach the plant. Once inside the sarcophagus, the player discovers the Wish Granter and a secret laboratory beneath it. Inside the lab is a terminal, where an entity known as the C-Consciousness resides.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: The C-Consciousness reveals that the player character "is" Strelok, as well as explaining the Zone and its history. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the Soviet Union used the complete vacancy of the Exclusion Zone for unhindered secret research into the human mind. This resulted in the development of ESP and psychic weapons. Seven scientists were neurally-linked, creating a hivemind known as the C-Consciousness. When the Soviet Union fell five years later, the C-Consciousness took control of the Zone and continued the research. The hivemind attempted to create world peace through global mind-control. This attempt failed and caused the anomalies and reality-warping nature of the Zone. To protect itself, the C-Consciousness created the Brain Scorcher and Wish Granter. The Wish Granter brainwashes those who reach it, turning them into Monolith soldiers.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: The C-Consciousness gives Strelok the option to merge with it and become part of the hivemind. The player can either accept this offer or attempt to stop the C-Consciousness. If Strelok rejects the offer, the hivemind teleports him away. To reach the hivemind Strelok must fight through Monolith soldiers and mutants, and navigate anomalies. Upon reaching the C-Consciousness, Strelok shoots the capsules holding the scientists, killing the hivemind. He then destroys the unit prepared for him, leaves the facility and lays down on the grass, unsure if he made the right choice but relieved that his ordeal is finally over.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: The X-Ray Engine is a DirectX 8.1/9 Shader Model 3.0 graphics engine. Up to a million polygons can be on-screen at any one time. The engine features HDR rendering, parallax and normal mapping, soft shadows, motion blur, widescreen support, weather effects and day/night cycles. As with other engines that use deferred shading, the X-Ray Engine does not support multisample anti-aliasing with dynamic lighting enabled. However, a different form of anti-aliasing can be enabled with dynamic lighting which utilizes an edge detection algorithm to smooth edges between objects. The game takes place in a thirty square kilometer area, and both the outside and inside of this area are rendered to the same amount of detail. Some textures in the game were photographs of the walls in the developers' studio. As of patch 1.0003 the X-Ray Engine supports "surround screen" monitor setups, including a 16:9 native resolution ratio.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: The X-Ray Engine is among the first of its kind to feature real time Global illumination through a method called Photon mapping, the GI system runs entirely through the CPU on one core and was first seen implemented in a beta build as early as 2004 however remained experimental through ShoC development most likely due to its massive performance hit.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: The X-ray engine uses GSC Game World's proprietary ALife artificial intelligence engine. ALife supports more than one thousand characters inhabiting the Zone. These characters are non-scripted, meaning that AI life can be developed even when not in contact with the player. The NPCs have a full life cycle (task accomplishment, combat, rest, feeding and sleep) and the same applies to the many monsters living in the Zone (hunting, attacking stalkers and other monsters, resting, eating, sleeping). These monsters migrate in large groups. The non-scripted nature of the characters means that there are an unlimited number of random quests. For instance, rescuing stalkers from danger, destroying stalker renegades, protecting or attacking stalker camps or searching for treasure. The AI characters travel around the entire Zone as they see fit. Several attack tactics were cut for difficulty reasons, including the ability for enemies to heal wounded allies and give orders.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." uses a heavily modified version of the ODE physics engine. Ragdoll physics, destructible objects, realistic bullet ballistics and skeletal animation can all be found in the game. Bullets are affected by gravity, bounced against solid surfaces at oblique angles, and firearms are highly inaccurate when fired without aiming. To score consistent hits at medium or long range, players must aim using the iron sights on their guns. Additionally, hit damage is pseudo-realistic, and the player can die after only being shot a few times (although later in the game various armor suits and artifacts can be acquired that increase the player's resistance to damage). Late-game depends heavily on scoped weaponry due to the well-armed and armored enemies that keep their distance from the player.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: A weather system is integrated into various parts of the landscape and allows a variety of weather effects, such as sunshine, storms and showers. The weapons available, behavior of the AI, game tactics and ranking systems depend on the weather. Unlike most dynamic weather systems, the game features complete dynamic wet surfaces such as pavement, concrete, brick walls, etc.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: The game features ambient music by Vladimir Frey aka "MoozE". It also has three songs from the Ukrainian band Firelake.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: The game was first announced by GSC Game World in November 2001, as "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost", although it had been talked about as early as 2000. It had its release date, originally as summer 2003, pushed back several times. Meanwhile, hundreds of screenshots of the game had been released, as well as a dozen preview video clips, accompanied by other forms of promotion by GSC, such as inviting fans to their offices in Kiev to play the current build of the game. However, due to the delays some considered "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." to be vaporware.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: In late December 2003, a pre-alpha build of the game was leaked to peer-to-peer file sharing networks. This build, marked as version 1096, inadvertently acted as a fully functional tech demo of "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s" engine, despite its lack of NPC enemies and fauna. After that, with the game missing the 2003 release date and still far from being finished, the publisher THQ sent Dean Sharpe (the later CEO of "Metro" developer 4A Games, which would be formed by some ex-members of GSC Game World who had worked on "Shadow of Chernobyl") to oversee cutting many features and downsizing the overall scale and ambitions to save it from development hell, leaving much of it to be picked up in a sequel.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: In February 2005, THQ expressed a desire to see the game released toward the end of its 2006 fiscal year (31 March 2006) but maintained that no release date had been set. In October 2005, THQ confirmed that "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." would not be out "until the second half of THQ's 2007 fiscal year - October 2006 at the earliest." In February 2006, THQ revised this possible release window, saying the game would not be in stores until the first quarter of 2007. In an interview at the Russian Gameland Awards, PR Manager Oleg Yavorsky indicated that release was planned for September 2006. In 2006, the game came 9th in "Wired"s Vaporware '06 award.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: In late February GSC managed to release a public beta. A multiplayer demo was released to the public on 15 March 2007. On 2 March 2007, it was announced that the game went gold.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: In February 2009, due to popular demand GSC Game World released "xrCore" build 1935, dated 18 October 2004. It uses a completely different physics engine with many cut monsters, levels, and vehicles. It was also significantly larger than the retail release. It is however somewhat unstable, but features the full game along with a "fully functional ALife system". It is currently available for free download from the GSC servers and mirrors. Multiple other builds of the game have been since publicly released as well, along with design documents.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl" received generally positive reviews, with critics praising the game for its style and depth while criticising technical issues, mentioning the number of bugs present. It received a score of 82.70% on GameRankings and 82/100 on Metacritic.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: The game design of the Zone was one of the most favored aspects. GameSpot praised the style and level design, stating "This is a bleak game, but in a good way, as it captures its post apocalyptic setting perfectly", while Eurogamer called it "one of the scariest games on the PC", going on to say "Like the mythological Chernobyl zone it is based upon, this game is a treacherous, darkly beautiful terrain." "Game Informer" did not find the gameplay particularly innovative, but still complimented the basic FPS design, saying, ""S.T.A.L.K.E.R." isn’t the revolution that we all hoped it would be. It is, however, a respectable and sometimes excellent first-person adventure" whereas GameSpot called it "one of the best ballistics models ever seen in a game, and as a result, firefights feel authentic as you try and hit someone with what can be a wildly inaccurate rifle".


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: Upon release, "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." was criticized for having numerous bugs, especially when used with the then-recently released Windows Vista. IGN found the game "tended to stutter quite often, sometimes pausing for three or four seconds at regular intervals, which occurred on two different Windows XP computers at maximum visual quality," and some cases of game crashing glitches. Another criticized aspect was the story, which to some reviewers was "incoherent" and which "PC Gamer" stated "fails in the specific story of your character".


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." won the Special Achievement award for Best Atmosphere in GameSpot's Best and Worst 2007, stating that ""S.T.A.L.K.E.R." captures the 'ghost town' nature of the zone, from the abandoned cities to the overgrown wilderness. Then, the game adds its own paranormal elements, which help make a spooky environment almost terrifying at times."


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." received a "Silver" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom. As of September 2008, "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." has sold 2 million copies worldwide. GSC Game World CEO Sergiy Grygorovych has said "We are very pleased that "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." became so popular among players from all over the world. Financial success will allow us to develop "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." in different directions as a brand."


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky" is a prequel set eight months before "Shadow of Chernobyl". The game world consists of a mix of old, redesigned areas and completely new levels. The updated engine supports the Inverse Kinematics animation system, allowing more and better animations. New effects such as volumetric lighting were also included. In general, the developers sought to take the basics of everything in "Shadow of Chernobyl" and enhance them. Better AI, graphics and new game-play additions, such as faction wars, were some of the added features.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat" is a sequel set after the events in "Shadow of Chernobyl". The game features new areas recreated by their true-to-life locales such as Pripyat town, Yanov Railway Station, Jupiter Factory, Kopachi Village and more. Other features include an improved A-Life system, a new player interface, a brand-new story and a number of unique characters, two new monsters and behavior and abilities, an extended system of side quests, a sleep function and a free play mode.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: In 2014, a mod aimed at restoring cancelled features from the early versions of the game was released as a standalone game titled "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha", development of which has since still continued with "Lost Alpha - Developer's Cut" released in 2017. Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Craig Pearson praised many aspects of the 2014 version, but also noted the presence of stability problems and bugs.


title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

text: "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl" is an upcoming video game currently slated for release on 2023.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: Labor Day is a 2013 American drama film written and directed by Jason Reitman, based on the 2009 novel of the same name by Joyce Maynard. The film stars Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin and was co-produced by Paramount Pictures and Indian Paintbrush, premiering at the Telluride Film Festival on August 29, 2013, and was a Special Presentation at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was released in the United States on January 31, 2014.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: In 1987, Adele Wheeler is a depressed single mother who lives in a rural home with her 13-year-old son, Henry. While they are shopping, a man approaches Henry and makes them take him home to look after him. The man is revealed to be Frank Chambers, an escaped convict wanted by police.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: Through flashbacks, it is revealed that Frank is a Vietnam War veteran who married his pregnant girlfriend, Mandy Chambers. A year after the baby's birth, they had a fight, in which he asked if he was the father. He pushed her against a radiator, resulting in her death. Simultaneously, through imagery, it is implied that the baby drowned. Frank was put in prison for murder.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: Adele tells Frank, seen through flashbacks, that she had a number of miscarriages after Henry, culminating with the full-term stillbirth of a baby girl. This has left Adele with severe anxiety and depression, which Henry's father later explains to Henry as the reasons their marriage failed.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: Henry has tried to be both a son and a husband but he realizes he cannot provide all of the things Adele needs. She is a passionate woman who loves to dance and teaches both Henry and Frank separately to dance. Frank teaches Henry car repairs and other things. He also teaches Adele and Henry how to play baseball and how to bake a peach pie.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: Adele and Frank fall in love and plan to escape to Canada with Henry, packing the car and cleaning out the house. Meanwhile, Henry develops a friendship with an intelligent and rebellious girl his age named Eleanor, and goes to see her one more time before they leave. She manipulates him into thinking Adele and Frank are going to abandon him and he accidentally reveals Frank's past. Adele assures Henry she would never leave him.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: The morning they are going to leave, Henry takes a note to his father's house and leaves it in his mailbox. While he is walking home, a policeman offers to drive him home, and Henry accepts. The policeman is suspicious of the packed car and nearly-empty house, but eventually leaves. Adele goes to the bank to get all the money out of her account, and the bank staff, too, are suspicious. While Adele is gone, a neighbor comes over and speaks to Frank. She, too, is suspicious of who he may be.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: Henry's father finds the note that Henry left, and calls the house. Before Adele, Frank, and Henry can escape, they hear police sirens approaching. Frank ties Henry and Adele up before he goes out to surrender, so that they won't be charged with harboring a fugitive. It is not revealed who called the police to report Frank's presence at the house. Adele wants to plead in Frank's case but is warned by the prosecutor himself that if she does, Henry might be taken away from her. She writes letters to Frank but to protect her he returns them all unopened.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: Years later, adult Henry has become the successful owner of a pie shop and is contacted by Frank, who has seen Henry and his shop in a magazine. He tells Henry he will be released soon and asks him whether or not he should see his mother again. Henry lets Frank know that his mother is still single and lives in the same house. We see Frank appearing to her and they embrace. Adele and Frank in the autumn years of their lives walk in love and Henry takes solace in the fact that he does not need to worry about her being alone.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: In September 2009, it was announced that Reitman was working on a screenplay, based on Joyce Maynard's novel. Talking about the story, Reitman said that "I read it, and I saw the movie in my head. It challenged me in a way that I liked. It was different from everything else I’ve read." He also admitted that it was completely different from his previous work and said that "[it] deals with a very complex drama. And I may not nail it on this film, it may just be my first step." Reitman wanted to make the film right after his 2009 film "Up in the Air", but due to Winslet's scheduling conflicts, he chose to direct "Young Adult" first.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: Reitman had Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin in mind for the lead roles. In June 2011, it was revealed that Winslet and Brolin had joined the cast of the film. On casting the actors, he said, "I know what actors I want for it. I'll be able to go to them easily" and that "[Winslet] makes those characters beautiful and sexual. I don’t know another actor who does that. I don’t know what I would have done if she’d said no."


title: Labor Day (film)

text: In April 2012, it was announced that James Van Der Beek has joined the cast of the film as a Police Officer and Gattlin Griffith as young Henry Wheeler. In June 2012, it was confirmed that Alexie Gilmore, Brighid Fleming, Lucas Hedges and Micah Fowler had joined the cast of the film. Later Tobey Maguire rounded out the cast and joined the film as adult Henry Wheeler.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: Production began for the film on June 5, 2012. Reitman and the film's art director Steve Saklad searched a number of houses in Massachusetts as most of the film is set inside the Wheelers' home. According to Reitman, "We searched the entire state of Massachusetts for that house. My location manager has never looked at that many locations looking for one place. For weeks we would just drive down the street, knocking on people’s doors. The house we found was perfect but it was very modern. Steve brought it back to 1987."


title: Labor Day (film)

text: Principal photography for the film began on June 13, 2012, in Massachusetts. The filming locations included Acton, Belchertown, Shelburne Falls, Ashland, Sutton, Mansfield, Maynard, Natick, Medfield, and Medway, Massachusetts. Filming moved to Acton and scenes shot around Piper Road and at a house located in the area. The movie was also filmed at Canobie Lake Park in Salem, New Hampshire. The filming finished on 17 August 2012.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: The first image of Winslet, Brolin, and Griffith was released on July 23, 2013, along with the announcement of film having its world premiere at 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. After its premiere at TIFF, the official poster for the film was revealed on 20 September 2013. The first official trailer of the film was released on October 31, 2013 followed by a second trailer released in November 2013.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: Paramount partnered with the American Pie Council (APC) in promoting the film, and the APC produced materials promoting both the film and National Pie Day (January 23, eight days before the film's general American release).


title: Labor Day (film)

text: The soundtrack was composed by Rolfe Kent who previously composed music for Reitman's "Thank You for Smoking" (2005), "Up in the Air" (2009) and "Young Adult" (2011). The album features "I'm Going Home" from Arlo Guthrie and "Here Before" from Vashti Bunyan. It also contains guitar pieces by Andrés Segovia and Shin-Ichi Fukuda. Talking about the music, Kent said that "You know it’s simple to compose happy or sad music, but to create something simple yet sophisticated, that calls the listener to be curious and yet uncertain and perhaps a little unnerved, well it called me to forget everything I knew about composition and discover a whole new musical language. It was at once incredibly stressful, and deeply rewarding."


title: Labor Day (film)

text: "Film Music Magazine's" Daniel Schweiger praised the soundtrack as "most impactful insights to the human condition, while completely surprising with its cinematic, and musical authorships." Kaya Savas of "Film Music Media" gave the album four and a half star out of five and said that "There is beauty, sadness and uneasiness all tackled with a wonderfully calculated approach."


title: Labor Day (film)

text: The soundtrack album features three songs. "Wings" from Birdy and "Take Us Alive" from Other Lives were featured in the trailers of the movie.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: The film had a limited release on December 27, 2013, for a one-week awards-qualifying run and had a wide release on January 31, 2014, in the United States.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: The film was released on DVD + Blu-ray in US on April 29, 2014. Bonus features include deleted scenes, a "End of Summer: making-of" Labor Day segment, and commentary featuring Reitman, cinematographer Steelberg, and first assistant director/co-producer Jason Blumenfeld.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: The film was opened wide along with "That Awkward Moment" on Super Bowl weekend. It grossed an estimated $5.3 million in its first three days and ranked seventh on its opening weekend, in domestic box office rankings by Rentrak. The film grossed $13.3 million in the U.S. and $6.9 million in the rest of the world, resulting in a worldwide gross of $20.2 million.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: According to the aggregate review site Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 34% approval rating based on 202 reviews, with an average rating of 5.2/10. The website's critical consensus states: "Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin make for an undeniably compelling pair, but they can't quite rescue "Labor Day" from the pallid melodrama of its exceedingly ill-advised plot." On Metacritic, the film holds an average score of 52 out of 100, based on 43 reviews from mainstream critics, which indicates "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B-" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Labor Day (film)

text: Todd McCarthy of "The Hollywood Reporter", in his review said that "the film emits frequent pangs of emotion and tension, which enable it to prevail over threats from the cliches and inevitabilities of the story's format. There is more than one instance when events will cause many viewers' hearts to leap, as they say, into their throats, and the wrap-up is quietly satisfying." Peter Debruge of "Variety" stated that "Labor Day" brims with such carefully observed details, all of them a little too elegant to feel entirely genuine, and yet impossible to fault" and that Winslet "communicates Adele's fragility in a matter of a few short scenes." Lou Lumenick in his review for the "New York Post", compared the film with Clint Eastwood's "A Perfect World". Mark Kermode of the BBC gave the film a positive review and praised Winslet's performance.


title: Melon

text: A melon is any of various plants of the family Cucurbitaceae with sweet, edible, and fleshy fruit. The word "melon" can refer to either the plant or specifically to the fruit. Botanically, a melon is a kind of berry, specifically a "pepo". The word "melon" derives from Latin "", which is the latinization of the Greek ("mēlopepōn"), meaning "melon", itself a compound of ("mēlon"), "apple, treefruit ("of any kind")" and ("pepōn"), amongst others "a kind of gourd or melon". Many different cultivars have been produced, particularly of cantaloupes.


title: Melon

text: Melons originated in Africa or in the hot valleys of Southwest Asia, especially Iran and India, from where they gradually began to appear in Europe toward the end of the Western Roman Empire. Melons are known to have been grown by the ancient Egyptians. However, recent discoveries of melon seeds dated between 1350 and 1120 BCE in Nuragic sacred wells have shown that melons were first brought to Europe by the Nuragic civilization of Sardinia during the Bronze Age. Melons were among the earliest plants to be domesticated in the Old World and among the first crop species brought by westerners to the New World. Early European settlers in the New World are recorded as growing honeydew and casaba melons as early as the 1600s. A number of Native American tribes in New Mexico, including Acoma, Cochiti, Isleta, Navajo, Santo Domingo and San Felipe, maintain a tradition of growing their own characteristic melon cultivars, derived from melons originally introduced by the Spanish. Organizations like Native Seeds/SEARCH have made an effort to collect and preserve these and other heritage seeds.


title: Melon

text: Melons in genus "Cucumis" are culinary fruits, and include the majority of culinary melons. All but a handful of culinary melon varieties belong to the species "Cucumis melo L."


title: Melon

text: In 2018, world production of melons was 27 million tonnes, led by China with 46% of the total (table). Turkey, Iran, and India each produced more than 1 million tonnes.


title: Puss in Boots

text: "Puss in Boots" () is an Italian fairy tale, later spread throughout the rest of Europe, about an anthropomorphic cat who uses trickery and deceit to gain power, wealth, and the hand of a princess in marriage for his penniless and low-born master.


title: Puss in Boots

text: The oldest written telling is by Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola, who included it in his "The Facetious Nights of Straparola" (c. 1550–1553) in XIV–XV. Another version was published in 1634 by Giambattista Basile with the title "Cagliuso", and a tale was written in French at the close of the seventeenth century by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), a retired civil servant and member of the "Académie française". There is a version written by Girolamo Morlini, from whom Straparola used various tales in "The Facetious Nights of Straparola". The tale appeared in a handwritten and illustrated manuscript two years before its 1697 publication by Barbin in a collection of eight fairy tales by Perrault called "Histoires ou contes du temps passé". The book was an instant success and remains popular.


title: Puss in Boots

text: Perrault's "Histoires" has had considerable impact on world culture. The original Italian title of the first edition was "Costantino Fortunato", but was later known as "Il gatto con gli stivali" (lit. "The cat with the boots"); the French title was "Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités" with the subtitle "Les Contes de ma mère l'Oye" ("Stories or Fairy Tales from Past Times with Morals", subtitled "Mother Goose Tales"). The frontispiece to the earliest English editions depicts an old woman telling tales to a group of children beneath a placard inscribed "MOTHER GOOSE'S TALES" and is credited with launching the Mother Goose legend in the English-speaking world.


title: Puss in Boots

text: "Puss in Boots" has provided inspiration for composers, choreographers, and other artists over the centuries. The cat appears in the third act "pas de caractère" of Tchaikovsky's ballet "The Sleeping Beauty", appears in the sequels and self-titled Shrek movie to the animated film "Shrek" and is signified in the logo of Japanese anime studio Toei Animation. Puss in Boots is also a popular pantomime in the UK.


title: Puss in Boots

text: The tale opens with the third and youngest son of a miller receiving his inheritance - a cat. At first, the youngest son laments, as the eldest brother gains their father's mill, and the middle brother gets the mule-and-cart. However, the feline is no ordinary cat, but one who requests and receives a pair of boots. Determined to make his master's fortune, the cat bags a rabbit in the forest and presents it to the king as a gift from his master, the fictional Marquis of Carabas. The cat continues making gifts of game to the king for several months, for which he is rewarded.


title: Puss in Boots

text: One day, the king decides to take a drive with his daughter. The cat persuades his master to remove his clothes and enter the river which their carriage passes. The cat disposes of his master's clothing beneath a rock. As the royal coach nears, the cat begins calling for help in great distress. When the king stops to investigate, the cat tells him that his master the Marquis has been bathing in the river and robbed of his clothing. The king has the young man brought from the river, dressed in a splendid suit of clothes, and seated in the coach with his daughter, who falls in love with him at once.


title: Puss in Boots

text: The cat hurries ahead of the coach, ordering the country folk along the road to tell the king that the land belongs to the "Marquis of Carabas", saying that if they do not he will cut them into mincemeat. The cat then happens upon a castle inhabited by an ogre who is capable of transforming himself into a number of creatures. The ogre displays his ability by changing into a lion, frightening the cat, who then tricks the ogre into changing into a mouse. The cat then pounces upon the mouse and devours it. The king arrives at the castle that formerly belonged to the ogre, and impressed with the bogus Marquis and his estate, gives the lad the princess in marriage. Thereafter; the cat enjoys life as a great lord who runs after mice only for his own amusement.


title: Puss in Boots

text: The tale is followed immediately by two morals; "one stresses the importance of possessing "industrie" and "savoir faire" while the other extols the virtues of dress, countenance, and youth to win the heart of a princess". The Italian translation by Carlo Collodi notes that the tale gives useful advice if you happen to be a cat or a Marquis of Carabas.


title: Puss in Boots

text: This is the theme in France, but other versions of this theme exist in Asia, Africa, and South America.


title: Puss in Boots

text: Perrault's the "Master Cat or Puss in Boots" is the most renowned tale in all of Western folklore of the animal as helper. However, the trickster cat did not originate with Perrault. Centuries before the publication of Perrault's tale, Somadeva, a Kashmir Brahmin, assembled a vast collection of Indian folk tales called "Kathā Sarit Sāgara" (lit. "The ocean of the streams of stories") that featured stock fairy tale characters and trappings such as invincible swords, vessels that replenish their contents, and helpful animals. In the "Panchatantra" (lit. "Five Principles"), a collection of Hindu tales from the second century BC., a tale follows a cat who fares much less well than Perrault's Puss as he attempts to make his fortune in a king's palace.


title: Puss in Boots

text: In 1553, "Costantino Fortunato", a tale similar to "Le Maître Chat", was published in Venice in Giovanni Francesco Straparola's "Le Piacevoli Notti" (lit. "The Facetious Nights"), the first European storybook to include fairy tales. In Straparola's tale however, the poor young man is the son of a Bohemian woman, the cat is a fairy in disguise, the princess is named Elisetta, and the castle belongs not to an ogre but to a lord who conveniently perishes in an accident. The poor young man eventually becomes King of Bohemia. An edition of Straparola was published in France in 1560. The abundance of oral versions after Straparola's tale may indicate an oral source to the tale; it also is possible Straparola invented the story.


title: Puss in Boots

text: In 1634, another tale with a trickster cat as hero was published in Giambattista Basile's collection "Pentamerone" although neither the collection nor the tale were published in France during Perrault's lifetime. In Basile's version, the lad is a beggar boy called Gagliuso (sometimes Cagliuso) whose fortunes are achieved in a manner similar to Perrault's Puss. However, the tale ends with Cagliuso, in gratitude to the cat, promising the feline a gold coffin upon his death. Three days later, the cat decides to test Gagliuso by pretending to be dead and is mortified to hear Gagliuso tell his wife to take the dead cat by its paws and throw it out the window. The cat leaps up, demanding to know whether this was his promised reward for helping the beggar boy to a better life. The cat then rushes away, leaving his master to fend for himself. In another rendition, the cat performs acts of bravery, then a fairy comes and turns him to his normal state to be with other cats.


title: Puss in Boots

text: It is likely that Perrault was aware of the Straparola tale, since 'Facetious Nights' was translated into French in the sixteenth century and subsequently passed into the oral tradition.


title: Puss in Boots

text: The oldest record of written history was published in Venice by the Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola in his "The Facetious Nights of Straparola" (c. 1550–53) in XIV-XV. His original title was "Costantino Fortunato" (lit. "Lucky Costantino").


title: Puss in Boots

text: The story was published under the French title "Le Maître Chat, ou le Chat Botté" ('Master Cat, or the Booted Cat') by Barbin in Paris in January 1697 in a collection of tales called "Histoires ou contes du temps passé". The collection included "La Belle au bois dormant" ("The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood"), "Le petit chaperon rouge" ("Little Red Riding Hood"), "La Barbe bleue" ("Blue Beard"), "Les Fées" ("The Enchanted Ones", or "Diamonds and Toads"), "Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre" ("Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper"), "Riquet à la Houppe" ("Riquet with the Tuft"), and "Le Petit Poucet" ("Hop o' My Thumb"). The book displayed a frontispiece depicting an old woman telling tales to a group of three children beneath a placard inscribed "CONTES DE MA MERE L'OYE" (Tales of Mother Goose). The book was an instant success.


title: Puss in Boots

text: "Le Maître Chat" first was translated into English as "The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots" by Robert Samber in 1729 and published in London for J. Pote and R. Montagu with its original companion tales in "Histories, or Tales of Past Times, By M. Perrault". The book was advertised in June 1729 as being "very entertaining and instructive for children". A frontispiece similar to that of the first French edition appeared in the English edition launching the Mother Goose legend in the English-speaking world. Samber's translation has been described as "faithful and straightforward, conveying attractively the concision, liveliness and gently ironic tone of Perrault's prose, which itself emulated the direct approach of oral narrative in its elegant simplicity." Since that publication, the tale has been translated into various languages and published around the world.


title: Puss in Boots

text: Perrault's son Pierre Darmancour was assumed to have been responsible for the authorship of "Histoires" with the evidence cited being the book's dedication to Élisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans, the youngest niece of Louis XIV, which was signed "P. Darmancour". Perrault senior, however, was known for some time to have been interested in "contes de veille" or "contes de ma mère l'oye", and in 1693 published a versification of "Les Souhaits Ridicules" and, in 1694, a tale with a Cinderella theme called "Peau d'Ane". Further, a handwritten and illustrated manuscript of five of the tales (including "Le Maistre Chat ou le Chat Botté") existed two years before the tale's 1697 Paris publication.


title: Puss in Boots

text: Pierre Darmancour was sixteen or seventeen years old at the time the manuscript was prepared and, as scholars Iona and Peter Opie note, quite unlikely to have been interested in recording fairy tales. Darmancour, who became a soldier, showed no literary inclinations, and, when he died in 1700, his obituary made no mention of any connection with the tales. However, when Perrault senior died in 1703, the newspaper alluded to his being responsible for "La Belle au bois dormant", which the paper had published in 1696.


title: Puss in Boots

text: In folkloristics, "Puss in Boots" is classified as Aarne–Thompson–Uther ATU 545B, "Puss in Boots", a subtype of ATU 545, "The Cat as Helper". Folklorists Joseph Jacobs and Stith Thompson point that the Perrault's tale is the possible source of the Cat Helper story in later European folkloric traditions. The tale has also spread to the Americas, and is known in Asia (India, Indonesia and Philippines).


title: Puss in Boots

text: Variations of the feline helper across cultures replace the cat with a jackal or fox. For instance, the helpful animal is a monkey "in all Philippine variants" according to Damiana Eugenio.


title: Puss in Boots

text: Greek scholar Marianthi Kaplanoglou states that the tale type ATU 545B, "Puss in Boots" (or, locally, "The Helpful Fox"), is an "example" of "widely known stories (...) in the repertoires of Greek refugees from Asia Minor".


title: Puss in Boots

text: Perrault's tale has been adapted to various media over the centuries. Ludwig Tieck published a dramatic satire based on the tale, called "Der gestiefelte Kater", and, in 1812, the Brothers Grimm inserted a version of the tale into their "Kinder- und Hausmärchen". In ballet, Puss appears in the third act of Tchaikovsky's "The Sleeping Beauty" in a "pas de caractère" with The White Cat.


title: Puss in Boots

text: The phrase "enough to make a cat laugh" dates from the mid-1800s and is associated with the tale of Puss in Boots.


title: Puss in Boots

text: The Bibliothèque de Carabas book series was published by David Nutt in London in the late 19th century, in which the front cover of each volume depicts Puss in Boots reading a book.


title: Puss in Boots

text: In film and television, Walt Disney produced an animated black and white silent short based on the tale in 1922.


title: Puss in Boots

text: It was also adapted by Toei as anime feature film in 1969, It followed by two sequels. Hayao Miyazaki made manga series as a promotional tie-in for the film. The title character, Pero, named after Perrault, has since then become the mascot of Toei Animation, with his face appearing in the studio's logo.


title: Puss in Boots

text: In the mid-1980s, "Puss in Boots" was televised as an episode of "Faerie Tale Theatre" with Ben Vereen and Gregory Hines in the cast.


title: Puss in Boots

text: 1987's anime "Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics" features Puss in Boots, This version of Puss cheats his good-natured master out of money to buy his boots and his hat, hunts the king's favorite thrush for introduced his master to the king.


title: Puss in Boots

text: Another version from the "Cannon Movie Tales" series features Christopher Walken as Puss, who in this adaptation is a cat who turns into a human when wearing the boots.


title: Puss in Boots

text: The TV show "" features the story in a Hawaiian setting. The episode stars the voices of David Hyde Pierce as Puss in Boots, Dean Cain as Kuhio, Pat Morita as King Makahana, and Ming-Na Wen as Lani. In addition, the shapeshifting ogre is replaced with a shapeshifting giant (voiced by Keone Young).


title: Puss in Boots

text: Another adaptation of the character with little relation to the story was in the Pokémon anime episode "Like a Meowth to a Flame," where a Meowth owned by the character Tyson wore boots, a hat, and a neckerchief.


title: Puss in Boots

text: DreamWorks Animation's 2004 animated film "Shrek 2" features a version of the character voiced by Antonio Banderas (and modeled after Banderas' performance as Zorro). An assassin initially hired to kill Shrek, Puss becomes one of Shrek's most loyal allies following his defeat. Banderas also voices Puss in the third and fourth films in the "Shrek" franchise, and in a 2011 spin-off animated feature "Puss in Boots", which spawned a 2022 sequel "". Puss also appears in the Netflix/DreamWorks series "The Adventures of Puss in Boots" where he is voiced by Eric Bauza.


title: Puss in Boots

text: Jacques Barchilon and Henry Pettit note in their introduction to "The Authentic Mother Goose: Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes" that the main motif of "Puss in Boots" is the animal as helper and that the tale "carries atavistic memories of the familiar totem animal as the father protector of the tribe found everywhere by missionaries and anthropologists." They also note that the title is original with Perrault as are the boots; no tale prior to Perrault's features a cat wearing boots.


title: Puss in Boots

text: Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie observe that "the tale is unusual in that the hero little deserves his good fortune, that is if his poverty, his being a third child, and his unquestioning acceptance of the cat's sinful instructions, are not nowadays looked upon as virtues." The cat should be acclaimed the prince of 'con' artists, they declare, as few swindlers have been so successful before or since.


title: Puss in Boots

text: The success of "Histoires" is attributed to seemingly contradictory and incompatible reasons. While the literary skill employed in the telling of the tales has been recognized universally, it appears the tales were set down in great part as the author "heard" them told. The evidence for that assessment lies first in the simplicity of the tales, then in the use of words that were, in Perrault's era, considered "populaire" and "du bas peuple", and finally, in the appearance of vestigial passages that now are superfluous to the plot, do not illuminate the narrative, and thus, are passages the Opies believe a literary artist would have rejected in the process of creating a work of art. One such vestigial passage is Puss's boots; his insistence upon the footwear is explained nowhere in the tale, it is not developed, nor is it referred to after its first mention except in an aside.


title: Puss in Boots

text: According to the Opies, Perrault's great achievement was accepting fairy tales at "their own level." He recounted them with neither impatience nor mockery, and without feeling that they needed any aggrandisement such as a frame story—although he must have felt it useful to end with a rhyming "moralité". Perrault would be revered today as the father of folklore if he had taken the time to record where he obtained his tales, when, and under what circumstances.


title: Puss in Boots

text: Bruno Bettelheim remarks that "the more simple and straightforward a good character in a fairy tale, the easier it is for a child to identify with it and to reject the bad other." The child identifies with a good hero because the hero's condition makes a positive appeal to him. If the character is a very good person, then the child is likely to want to be good too. Amoral tales, however, show no polarization or juxtaposition of good and bad persons because amoral tales such as "Puss in Boots" build character, not by offering choices between good and bad, but by giving the child hope that even the meekest can survive. Morality is of little concern in these tales, but rather, an assurance is provided that one can survive and succeed in life.


title: Puss in Boots

text: Small children can do little on their own and may give up in disappointment and despair with their attempts. Fairy stories, however, give great dignity to the smallest achievements (such as befriending an animal or being befriended by an animal, as in "Puss in Boots") and that such ordinary events may lead to great things. Fairy stories encourage children to believe and trust that their small, real achievements are important although perhaps not recognized at the moment.


title: Puss in Boots

text: In "Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion" Jack Zipes notes that Perrault "sought to portray ideal types to reinforce the standards of the civilizing process set by upper-class French society". A composite portrait of Perrault's heroines, for example, reveals the author's idealized female of upper-class society is graceful, beautiful, polite, industrious, well groomed, reserved, patient, and even somewhat stupid because for Perrault, intelligence in womankind would be threatening. Therefore, Perrault's composite heroine passively waits for "the right man" to come along, recognize her virtues, and make her his wife. He acts, she waits. If his seventeenth century heroines demonstrate any characteristics, it is submissiveness.


title: Puss in Boots

text: A composite of Perrault's male heroes, however, indicates the opposite of his heroines: his male characters are not particularly handsome, but they are active, brave, ambitious, and deft, and they use their wit, intelligence, and great civility to work their way up the social ladder and to achieve their goals. In this case of course, it is the cat who displays the characteristics and the man benefits from his trickery and skills. Unlike the tales dealing with submissive heroines waiting for marriage, the male-centered tales suggest social status and achievement are more important than marriage for men. The virtues of Perrault's heroes reflect upon the bourgeoisie of the court of Louis XIV and upon the nature of Perrault, who was a successful civil servant in France during the seventeenth century.


title: Puss in Boots

text: According to fairy and folk tale researcher and commentator Jack Zipes, Puss is "the epitome of the educated bourgeois secretary who serves his master with complete devotion and diligence." The cat has enough wit and manners to impress the king, the intelligence to defeat the ogre, and the skill to arrange a royal marriage for his low-born master. Puss's career is capped by his elevation to "grand seigneur" and the tale is followed by a double moral: "one stresses the importance of possessing "industrie et savoir faire" while the other extols the virtues of dress, countenance, and youth to win the heart of a princess."


title: Puss in Boots

text: The renowned illustrator of Dickens' novels and stories, George Cruikshank, was shocked that parents would allow their children to read "Puss in Boots" and declared: "As it stood the tale was a succession of successful falsehoods—a clever lesson in lying!—a system of imposture rewarded with the greatest worldly advantages."


title: Puss in Boots

text: Another critic, Maria Tatar, notes that there is little to admire in Puss—he threatens, flatters, deceives, and steals in order to promote his master. She further observes that Puss has been viewed as a "linguistic virtuoso", a creature who has mastered the arts of persuasion and rhetoric to acquire power and wealth.


title: Puss in Boots

text: "Puss in Boots" has successfully supplanted its antecedents by Straparola and Basile and the tale has altered the shapes of many older oral trickster cat tales where they still are found. The morals Perrault attached to the tales are either at odds with the narrative, or beside the point. The first moral tells the reader that hard work and ingenuity are preferable to inherited wealth, but the moral is belied by the poor miller's son who neither works nor uses his wit to gain worldly advantage, but marries into it through trickery performed by the cat. The second moral stresses womankind's vulnerability to external appearances: fine clothes and a pleasant visage are enough to win their hearts. In an aside, Tatar suggests that if the tale has any redeeming meaning, "it has something to do with inspiring respect for those domestic creatures that hunt mice and look out for their masters."


title: Puss in Boots

text: Briggs does assert that cats were a form of fairy in their own right having something akin to a fairy court and their own set of magical powers. Still, it is rare in Europe's fairy tales for a cat to be so closely involved with human affairs. According to Jacob Grimm, Puss shares many of the features that a household fairy or deity would have including a desire for boots which could represent seven-league boots. This may mean that the story of "Puss and Boots" originally represented the tale of a family deity aiding an impoverished family member.


title: Puss in Boots

text: Stefan Zweig, in his 1939 novel, "Ungeduld des Herzens", references Puss in Boots' procession through a rich and varied countryside with his master and drives home his metaphor with a mention of Seven League Boots.


title: Emergence

text: In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.


title: Emergence

text: Emergence plays a central role in theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry.


title: Emergence

text: Philosophers often understand emergence as a claim about the etiology of a system's properties. An emergent property of a system, in this context, is one that is not a property of any component of that system, but is still a feature of the system as a whole. Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950), one of the first modern philosophers to write on emergence, termed this a "categorial novum" (new category).


title: Emergence

text: This concept of emergence dates from at least the time of Aristotle. The many scientists and philosophers who have written on the concept include John Stuart Mill ("Composition of Causes", 1843) and Julian Huxley (1887–1975).


title: Emergence

text: The philosopher G. H. Lewes coined the term "emergent" in 1875, distinguishing it from the merely "resultant":


title: Emergence

text: Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same – their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference.


title: Emergence

text: In 1999 economist Jeffrey Goldstein provided a current definition of emergence in the journal "Emergence". Goldstein initially defined emergence as: "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems".


title: Emergence

text: In 2002 systems scientist Peter Corning described the qualities of Goldstein's definition in more detail:


title: Emergence

text: The common characteristics are: (1) radical novelty (features not previously observed in systems); (2) coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time); (3) A global or macro "level" (i.e. there is some property of "wholeness"); (4) it is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves); and (5) it is "ostensive" (it can be perceived).


title: Emergence

text: Corning suggests a narrower definition, requiring that the components be unlike in kind (following Lewes), and that they involve division of labor between these components. He also says that living systems (comparably to the game of chess), while emergent, cannot be reduced to underlying laws of emergence:


title: Emergence

text: Usage of the notion "emergence" may generally be subdivided into two perspectives, that of "weak emergence" and "strong emergence". One paper discussing this division is "Weak Emergence", by philosopher Mark Bedau. In terms of physical systems, weak emergence is a type of emergence in which the emergent property is amenable to computer simulation or similar forms of after-the-fact analysis (for example, the formation of a traffic jam, the structure of a flock of starlings in flight or a school of fish, or the formation of galaxies). Crucial in these simulations is that the interacting members retain their independence. If not, a new entity is formed with new, emergent properties: this is called strong emergence, which it is argued cannot be simulated or analysed.


title: Emergence

text: Some common points between the two notions are that emergence concerns new properties produced as the system grows, which is to say ones which are not shared with its components or prior states. Also, it is assumed that the properties are supervenient rather than metaphysically primitive.


title: Emergence

text: Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the interactions at an elemental level. However, Bedau stipulates that the properties can be determined only by observing or simulating the system, and not by any process of a reductionist analysis. As a consequence the emerging properties are scale dependent: they are only observable if the system is large enough to exhibit the phenomenon. Chaotic, unpredictable behaviour can be seen as an emergent phenomenon, while at a microscopic scale the behaviour of the constituent parts can be fully deterministic.


title: Emergence

text: Bedau notes that weak emergence is not a universal metaphysical solvent, as the hypothesis that consciousness is weakly emergent would not resolve the traditional philosophical questions about the physicality of consciousness. However, Bedau concludes that adopting this view would provide a precise notion that emergence is involved in consciousness, and second, the notion of weak emergence is metaphysically benign.


title: Emergence

text: Strong emergence describes the direct causal action of a high-level system upon its components; qualities produced this way are irreducible to the system's constituent parts. The whole is other than the sum of its parts. It is argued then that no simulation of the system can exist, for such a simulation would itself constitute a reduction of the system to its constituent parts. Physics lacks well-established examples of strong emergence, unless it is interpreted as the impossibility "in practice" to explain the whole in terms of the parts. Practical impossibility may be a more useful distinction than one in principle, since it is easier to determine and quantify, and does not imply the use of mysterious forces, but simply reflects the limits of our capability.


title: Emergence

text: However, biologist Peter Corning has asserted that "the debate about whether or not the whole can be predicted from the properties of the parts misses the point. Wholes produce unique combined effects, but many of these effects may be co-determined by the context and the interactions between the whole and its environment(s)". In accordance with his Synergism Hypothesis, Corning also stated: "It is the synergistic effects produced by wholes that are the very cause of the evolution of complexity in nature." Novelist Arthur Koestler used the metaphor of Janus (a symbol of the unity underlying complements like open/shut, peace/war) to illustrate how the two perspectives (strong vs. weak or holistic vs. reductionistic) should be treated as non-exclusive, and should work together to address the issues of emergence. Theoretical physicist PW Anderson states it this way:


title: Emergence

text: Some thinkers question the plausibility of strong emergence as contravening our usual understanding of physics. Mark A. Bedau observes:


title: Emergence

text: Strong emergence can be criticized for being causally overdetermined. The canonical example concerns emergent mental states (M and M∗) that supervene on physical states (P and P∗) respectively. Let M and M∗ be emergent properties. Let M∗ supervene on base property P∗. What happens when M causes M∗? Jaegwon Kim says:


title: Emergence

text: If M is the cause of M∗, then M∗ is overdetermined because M∗ can also be thought of as being determined by P. One escape-route that a strong emergentist could take would be to deny downward causation. However, this would remove the proposed reason that emergent mental states must supervene on physical states, which in turn would call physicalism into question, and thus be unpalatable for some philosophers and physicists.


title: Emergence

text: Meanwhile, others have worked towards developing analytical evidence of strong emergence. In 2009, Gu "et al." presented a class of infinite physical systems that exhibits non-computable macroscopic properties. More precisely, if one could compute certain macroscopic properties of these systems from the microscopic description of these systems, then one would be able to solve computational problems known to be undecidable in computer science. These results concern infinite systems, finite systems being considered computable. However, macroscopic concepts which only apply in the limit of infinite systems, such as phase transitions and the renormalization group, are important for understanding and modeling real, finite physical systems. Gu "et al." concluded that


title: Emergence

text: Emergent structures are patterns that emerge via the collective actions of many individual entities. To explain such patterns, one might conclude, per Aristotle, that emergent structures are more than the sum of their parts on the assumption that the emergent order will not arise if the various parts simply act independently of one another. However, there are those who disagree. According to this argument, the interaction of each part with its immediate surroundings causes a complex chain of processes that can lead to order in some form. In fact, some systems in nature are observed to exhibit emergence based upon the interactions of autonomous parts, and some others exhibit emergence that at least at present cannot be reduced in this way. In particular renormalization methods in theoretical physics enable scientists to study systems that are not tractable as the combination of their parts.


title: Emergence

text: Crutchfield regards the properties of complexity and organization of any system as subjective qualities determined by the observer.


title: Emergence

text: Defining structure and detecting the emergence of complexity in nature are inherently subjective, though essential, scientific activities. Despite the difficulties, these problems can be analysed in terms of how model-building observers infer from measurements the computational capabilities embedded in non-linear processes. An observer’s notion of what is ordered, what is random, and what is complex in its environment depends directly on its computational resources: the amount of raw measurement data, of memory, and of time available for estimation and inference. The discovery of structure in an environment depends more critically and subtly, though, on how those resources are organized. The descriptive power of the observer’s chosen (or implicit) computational model class, for example, can be an overwhelming determinant in finding regularity in data.


title: Emergence

text: On the other hand, Peter Corning argues: "Must the synergies be perceived/observed in order to qualify as emergent effects, as some theorists claim? Most emphatically not. The synergies associated with emergence are real and measurable, even if nobody is there to observe them."


title: Emergence

text: The low entropy of an ordered system can be viewed as an example of subjective emergence: the observer sees an ordered system by ignoring the underlying microstructure (i.e. movement of molecules or elementary particles) and concludes that the system has a low entropy.


title: Emergence

text: On the other hand, chaotic, unpredictable behaviour can also be seen as subjective emergent, while at a microscopic scale the movement of the constituent parts can be fully deterministic.


title: Emergence

text: In religion, emergence grounds expressions of religious naturalism and syntheism in which a sense of the sacred is perceived in the workings of entirely naturalistic processes by which more complex forms arise or evolve from simpler forms. Examples are detailed in "The Sacred Emergence of Nature" by Ursula Goodenough & Terrence Deacon and "Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred" by Stuart Kauffman, both from 2006, and in "Syntheism – Creating God in The Internet Age" by Alexander Bard & Jan Söderqvist from 2014. An early argument (1904–05) for the emergence of social formations, in part stemming from religion, can be found in Max Weber's most famous work, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism". Recently, the emergence of a new social system is linked with the emergence of order from nonlinear relationships among multiple interacting units, where multiple interacting units are individual thoughts, consciousness, and actions.


title: Emergence

text: In art, emergence is used to explore the origins of novelty, creativity, and authorship. Some art/literary theorists (Wheeler, 2006; Alexander, 2011) have proposed alternatives to postmodern understandings of "authorship" using the complexity sciences and emergence theory. They contend that artistic selfhood and meaning are emergent, relatively objective phenomena. Michael J. Pearce has used emergence to describe the experience of works of art in relation to contemporary neuroscience. Practicing artist Leonel Moura, in turn, attributes to his "artbots" a real, if nonetheless rudimentary, creativity based on emergent principles. In literature and linguistics, the concept of emergence has been applied in the domain of stylometry to explain the interrelation between the syntactical structures of the text and the author style (Slautina, Marusenko, 2014).


title: Emergence

text: In international development, concepts of emergence have been used within a theory of social change termed SEED-SCALE to show how standard principles interact to bring forward socio-economic development fitted to cultural values, community economics, and natural environment (local solutions emerging from the larger socio-econo-biosphere). These principles can be implemented utilizing a sequence of standardized tasks that self-assemble in individually specific ways utilizing recursive evaluative criteria.


title: Emergence

text: In postcolonial studies, the term "Emerging Literature" refers to a contemporary body of texts that is gaining momentum in the global literary landscape (v. esp.: J.M. Grassin, ed. "Emerging Literatures", Bern, Berlin, etc. : Peter Lang, 1996). By opposition, "emergent literature" is rather a concept used in the theory of literature.


title: Emergence

text: An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales. In other words, there is often a form of top-down feedback in systems with emergent properties. The processes causing emergent properties may occur in either the observed or observing system, and are commonly identifiable by their patterns of accumulating change, generally called 'growth'. Emergent behaviours can occur because of intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback, known as interconnectivity. The emergent property itself may be either very predictable or unpredictable and unprecedented, and represent a new level of the system's evolution. The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities. The shape and behaviour of a flock of birds or school of fish are good examples of emergent properties.


title: Emergence

text: One reason emergent behaviour is hard to predict is that the number of interactions between a system's components increases exponentially with the number of components, thus allowing for many new and subtle types of behaviour to emerge. Emergence is often a product of particular patterns of interaction. Negative feedback introduces constraints that serve to fix structures or behaviours. In contrast, positive feedback promotes change, allowing local variations to grow into global patterns. Another way in which interactions lead to emergent properties is dual-phase evolution. This occurs where interactions are applied intermittently, leading to two phases: one in which patterns form or grow, the other in which they are refined or removed.


title: Emergence

text: On the other hand, merely having a large number of interactions is not enough by itself to guarantee emergent behaviour; many of the interactions may be negligible or irrelevant, or may cancel each other out. In some cases, a large number of interactions can in fact hinder the emergence of interesting behaviour, by creating a lot of "noise" to drown out any emerging "signal"; the emergent behaviour may need to be temporarily isolated from other interactions before it reaches enough critical mass to self-support. Thus it is not just the sheer number of connections between components which encourages emergence; it is also how these connections are organised. A hierarchical organisation is one example that can generate emergent behaviour (a bureaucracy may behave in a way quite different from the individual departments of that bureaucracy); but emergent behaviour can also arise from more decentralized organisational structures, such as a marketplace. In some cases, the system has to reach a combined threshold of diversity, organisation, and connectivity before emergent behaviour appears.


title: Emergence

text: Unintended consequences and side effects are closely related to emergent properties. Luc Steels writes: "A component has a particular functionality but this is not recognizable as a subfunction of the global functionality. Instead a component implements a behaviour whose side effect contributes to the global functionality ... Each behaviour has a side effect and the sum of the side effects gives the desired functionality." In other words, the global or macroscopic functionality of a system with "emergent functionality" is the sum of all "side effects", of all emergent properties and functionalities.


title: Emergence

text: Systems with emergent properties or emergent structures may appear to defy entropic principles and the second law of thermodynamics, because they form and increase order despite the lack of command and central control. This is possible because open systems can extract information and order out of the environment.


title: Emergence

text: Emergent structures can be found in many natural phenomena, from the physical to the biological domain. For example, the shape of weather phenomena such as hurricanes are emergent structures. The development and growth of complex, orderly crystals, as driven by the random motion of water molecules within a conducive natural environment, is another example of an emergent process, where randomness can give rise to complex and deeply attractive, orderly structures.


title: Emergence

text: It is useful to distinguish three forms of emergent structures. A "first-order" emergent structure occurs as a result of shape interactions (for example, hydrogen bonds in water molecules lead to surface tension). A "second-order" emergent structure involves shape interactions played out sequentially over time (for example, changing atmospheric conditions as a snowflake falls to the ground build upon and alter its form). Finally, a "third-order" emergent structure is a consequence of shape, time, and heritable instructions. For example, an organism's genetic code affects the form of the organism's systems in space and time.


title: Emergence

text: In physics, emergence is used to describe a property, law, or phenomenon which occurs at macroscopic scales (in space or time) but not at microscopic scales, despite the fact that a macroscopic system can be viewed as a very large ensemble of microscopic systems.


title: Emergence

text: An emergent property need not be more complicated than the underlying non-emergent properties which generate it. For instance, the laws of thermodynamics are remarkably simple, even if the laws which govern the interactions between component particles are complex. The term emergence in physics is thus used not to signify complexity, but rather to distinguish which laws and concepts apply to macroscopic scales, and which ones apply to microscopic scales.


title: Emergence

text: However, another, perhaps more broadly applicable way to conceive of the emergent divide does involve a dose of complexity insofar as the computational feasibility of going from the microscopic to the macroscopic property tells the 'strength' of the emergence. This is better understood given the following definition of ("weak") emergence that comes from physics:


title: Emergence

text: An emergent behavior of a physical system is a qualitative property that can only occur in the limit that the number of microscopic constituents tends to infinity.


title: Emergence

text: Since there are no actually infinite systems in the real world, there is no obvious naturally occurring notion of a hard separation between the properties of the constituents of a system and those of the emergent whole. As discussed below, classical mechanics is thought to be emergent from quantum mechanics, though in principle, quantum dynamics fully describes everything happening at a classical level. However, it would take a computer larger than the size of the universe with more computing time than life time of the universe to describe the motion of a falling apple in terms of the locations of its electrons ; thus we can take this to be a "strong" emergent divide.


title: Emergence

text: In the case of "strong" emergence, the number of constituents can be much smaller. F.i. the emergent properties of a HO molecule are very different from its constituent parts oxygen and hydrogen.


title: Emergence

text: In some theories of particle physics, even such basic structures as mass, space, and time are viewed as emergent phenomena, arising from more fundamental concepts such as the Higgs boson or strings. In some interpretations of quantum mechanics, the perception of a deterministic reality, in which all objects have a definite position, momentum, and so forth, is actually an emergent phenomenon, with the true state of matter being described instead by a wavefunction which need not have a single position or momentum.


title: Emergence

text: Most of the laws of physics themselves as we experience them today appear to have emerged during the course of time making emergence the most fundamental principle in the universe and raising the question of what might be the most fundamental law of physics from which all others emerged. Chemistry can in turn be viewed as an emergent property of the laws of physics. Biology (including biological evolution) can be viewed as an emergent property of the laws of chemistry. Similarly, psychology could be understood as an emergent property of neurobiological laws. Finally, some economic theories understand economy as an emergent feature of psychology.


title: Emergence

text: According to Laughlin, for many particle systems, nothing can be calculated exactly from the microscopic equations, and macroscopic systems are characterised by broken symmetry: the symmetry present in the microscopic equations is not present in the macroscopic system, due to phase transitions. As a result, these macroscopic systems are described in their own terminology, and have properties that do not depend on many microscopic details. This does not mean that the microscopic interactions are irrelevant, but simply that you do not see them anymore — you only see a renormalized effect of them. Laughlin is a pragmatic theoretical physicist: if you cannot, possibly ever, calculate the broken symmetry macroscopic properties from the microscopic equations, then what is the point of talking about reducibility?