Related papers: Digital Business Ecosystems: Natural Science Parad…
In this paper we argue that the set of wireless, mobile devices (e.g., portable telephones, tablet PCs, GPS navigators, media players) commonly used by human users enables the construction of what we term a digital ecosystem, i.e., an…
Competitive interactions represent one of the driving forces behind evolution and natural selection in biological and sociological systems. For example, animals in an ecosystem may vie for food or mates; in a market economy, firms may…
The increasing volume of ecologically and biologically relevant data has revealed a wide collection of emergent patterns in living systems. Analyzing different datasets, ranging from metabolic gene-regulatory to species interaction…
The recent discovery of universal principles underlying many complex networks occurring across a wide range of length scales in the biological world has spurred physicists in trying to understand such features using techniques from…
We explore the commonalities between methods for assuring the security of computer systems (cybersecurity) and the mechanisms that have evolved through natural selection to protect vertebrates against pathogens, and how insights derived…
We create a novel optimisation technique inspired by natural ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of genes which are distributed in a peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time;…
Self-organization of heterogeneous particle swarms is rich in its dynamics but hard to design in a traditional top-down manner, especially when many types of kinetically distinct particles are involved. In this chapter, we discuss how we…
The pursuit of creating artificial intelligence (AI) mirrors our longstanding fascination with understanding our own intelligence. From the myths of Talos to Aristotelian logic and Heron's inventions, we have sought to replicate the marvels…
The mechanisms underlying eco-evolutionary dynamics (the feedback between ecological and evolutionary processes) are often unknown. Here, we propose that classical theory from behavioral ecology can provide a greater understanding of the…
Persistent economic competition is often justified as a mechanism of innovation, efficiency, and welfare maximization. Yet empirical evidence across disciplines reveals that competition systematically generates fragility, inequality, and…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic, and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing…
This chapter discusses the possibility of instilling a virtual world with mechanisms for evolution and natural selection in order to generate rich ecosystems of complex organisms in a process akin to biological evolution. Some previous work…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…
Complex evolving systems such as the biosphere, ecosystems and societies exhibit sudden collapses, for reasons that are only partially understood. Here we study this phenomenon using a mathematical model of a system that evolves under…
We propose a general scenario to analyze social and economic changes in modern environments. We illustrate the ideas with a model that incorporating the main trends is simple enough to extract analytical results and, at the same time,…
For billions of years, evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life, including humans. Evolution endowed humans with high intelligence, which allowed us to become one of the most successful species on the planet.…
Biological data in digital form has become a, if not the, driving force behind innovations in biology, medicine, and the environment. No study and no model would be complete without access to digital data (including text) collected by…
Ecosystems are systems where energy flows and material cycles are maintained in an apparently stable, but non-equilibrium state through a process of self-regulation. Such a definition does just apply to biological systems, it can also apply…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…