Related papers: Emergent complexity: what uphill analysis or downh…
According to quantum theory, randomness is a fundamental property of the universe yet classical physics is mostly deterministic. In this article I show that it is possible for deterministic systems to arise from random ones and discuss the…
If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
We explore the emergence of intelligent behavior in artificial systems by investigating how the complexity of rule-based systems influences the capabilities of models trained to predict these rules. Our study focuses on elementary cellular…
Thermodynamic criticality describes emergent phenomena in a wide variety of complex systems. In the mammalian brain, the complex dynamics that spontaneously emerge from neuronal interactions have been characterized as neuronal avalanches, a…
We review the recent proposal that the most fascinating brain properties are related to the fact that it always stays close to a second order phase transition. In such conditions, the collective of neuronal groups can reliably generate…
Universality of quantum mechanics -- its applicability to physical systems of quite different nature and scales -- indicates that quantum behavior can be a manifestation of general mathematical properties of systems containing…
Abrupt shifts in ecosystems, brains, markets, and climate are often diagnosed as signs of approaching a tipping point, i.e. a critical bifurcation where stability is lost. Here we reveal a broader and more deceptive mechanism:…
Since its application to systems, emergence has been explained in terms of levels of observation. This approach has led to confusion, contradiction, incoherence and at times mysticism. When the idea of level is replaced by a framework of…
Critical transitions are observed in many complex systems. This includes the onset of synchronization in a network of coupled oscillators or the emergence an epidemic state within a population. "Explosive" first-order transitions have…
From ancient philosophers to modern economists, biologists, and other researchers, there has been a continuous effort to unveil causal relations. The most formidable challenge lies in deducing the nature of the causal relationship: whether…
Recent research on the network modeling of complex systems has led to a convenient representation of numerous natural, social, and engineered systems that are now recognized as networks of interacting parts. Such systems can exhibit a…
In the last years the debate on complexity has been developing and developing in transdisciplinary way to meet the need of explanation for highly organized collective behaviors and sophisticated hierarchical arrangements in physical,…
Many-variable differential equations with random coefficients provide powerful models for the dynamics of many interacting species in ecology. These models are known to exhibit a dynamical phase transition from a phase where population…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology and Artificial Life (Bonner, 1988; Bedau et al., 2000). Complexification has been interpreted in different ways: as a process of diversification between evolving units…
We review possible measures of complexity which might in particular be applicable to situations where the complexity seems to arise spontaneously. We point out that not all of them correspond to the intuitive (or "naive") notion, and that…
We give a critical overview of various attempts to describe gravity as an emergent phenomenon, starting from examples of condensed matter physics, to arrive to more sophisticated pregeometric models. The common line of thought is to view…
While the idea of gravity as an emergent phenomenon is an intriguing one, little is known about concrete implementations that could lead to viable phenomenology, most of the obstructions being related to the intrinsic difficulties of…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such scale-free patterns were identified experimentally in many…