Self-Organization to the Edge of Ergodicity Breaking in a Complex Adaptive System
Abstract
Self-organized criticality (SOC) is widely proposed as a fundamental mechanism for collective behavior, yet its role in objective-driven, heterogeneous adaptive systems underpinning real complex systems remains less understood. We introduce EvoSK, a minimal evolutionary model in which agents perform memory dependent reinforcement learning on a rugged Sherrington-Kirkpatrick landscape while the population evolves through extremal replacement of the least fit agents. We demonstrate that this coupled dynamics drives the system to a critical state residing on the transition boundary between ergodic and non-ergodic phases. At this boundary, the system exhibits scale-free evolutionary avalanches with a mean-field exponent , while simultaneously achieving collective rewards that surpass those of any manually finetuned, non-evolutionary regime. Our results provide a mechanistic link between the statistical physics of ergodicity breaking and the functional optimality of complex adaptive systems, suggesting that the edge of ergodicity breaking acts as a robust attractor for systems adapting on rugged, high-dimensional landscapes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.15669,
title = {Self-Organization to the Edge of Ergodicity Breaking in a Complex Adaptive System},
author = {Nixie Sapphira Lesmana and Ling Feng and Kan Chen and Choy Heng Lai},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.15669},
year = {2026}
}