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Imitation is an important learning heuristic in animal and human societies. Previous explorations report that the fate of individuals with cooperative strategies is sensitive to the protocol of imitation, leading to a conundrum about how…
The interaction of all mobile species with their environment hinges on their movement patterns: the places they visit and how frequently they go there. In human society, where the prevalent form of cohabitation is in cities, the highly…
Imitative and contrarian behaviors are the two typical opposite attitudes of investors in stock markets. We introduce a simple model to investigate their interplay in a stock market where agents can take only two states, bullish or bearish.…
Prosocial behaviors are encountered in the donation game, the prisoner's dilemma, relaxed social dilemmas, and public goods games. Many studies assume that the population structure is homogeneous, meaning all individuals have the same…
Models of cooperation grounded on social networks and on the ability of individuals to choose actions and partners aim to describe human social behavior. Extensive computer simulations of these models give important insight in the social…
Hidden stochastic effects acting uniformly on a many-particle system can generate strong correlations and macroscopic relative fluctuations that persist at large system sizes, even when the particles themselves remain causally independent.…
Bursty dynamics characterizes systems that evolve through short active periods of several events, which are separated by long periods of inactivity. Systems with such temporal heterogeneities are not only found in nature but also include…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them…
Why are human societies unstable? Theories based on the observation of recurring patterns in historical data indicate that economic inequality, as well as social factors are key drivers. So far, models of this phenomenon are more…
In these notes we review emergent phenomena in complex systems, emphasizing ways to identify potential underlying universal mechanisms that generates complexity. The discussion is centered around the emergence of collective behavior in…
The bias/variance tradeoff is fundamental to learning: increasing a model's complexity can improve its fit on training data, but potentially worsens performance on future samples. Remarkably, however, the human brain effortlessly handles a…
This paper proposes a theory of creativity, referred to as honing theory, which posits that creativity fuels the process by which culture evolves through communal exchange amongst minds that are self-organizing, self-maintaining, and…
We introduce a new model that mimics the strong and sudden effects induced by conformity in tightly interacting human societies. Such effects range from mere crowd phenomena to dramatic political turmoil. The model is a modified version of…
This paper deals with the modeling of social competition, possibly resulting in the onset of extreme conflicts. More precisely, we discuss models describing the interplay between individual competition for wealth distribution that, when…
A dynamical systems scenario for developmental cell biology is proposed, based on numerical studies of a system with interacting units with internal dynamics and reproduction. Diversification, formation of discrete and recursive types, and…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
Unexpectedness is a central concept in Simplicity Theory, a theory of cognition relating various inferential processes to the computation of Kolmogorov complexities, rather than probabilities. Its predictive power has been confirmed by…
The human capacity for working together and with tools builds on cognitive abilities that, while not unique to humans, are most developed in humans both in scale and plasticity. Our capacity to engage with collaborators and with technology…
Collective cooperation drives the dynamics of many natural, social, and economic phenomena, making understanding the evolution of cooperation with evolutionary game theory a central question of modern science. Although human interactions…