Related papers: Characterization of Multispecies Living Ecosystems…
Cellular automata are capable of developing complex behaviors based on simple local interactions between their elements. Some of these characteristics have been used to propose and improve meta-heuristics for global optimization; however,…
Emergence and emergent behaviors are often defined as cases where changes in local interactions between agents at a lower level effectively changes what occurs in the higher level of the system (i.e., the whole swarm) and its properties.…
The gradual accumulation of damage and dysregulation during the aging of living organisms can be quantified. Even so, the aging process is complex and has multiple interacting physiological scales -- from the molecular to cellular to whole…
The immune system can be thought as a complex network of different interacting elements. A cellular automaton, defined in shape-space, was recently shown to exhibit self-regulation and complex behavior and is, therefore, a good candidate to…
Ecological systems are emergent features of ecological and adaptive dynamics of a community of interacting species. By natural selection through the abiotic environment and by co-adaptation within the community, species evolve, thereby…
We show techniques of analyzing complex dynamics of cellular automata (CA) with chaotic behaviour. CA are well known computational substrates for studying emergent collective behaviour, complexity, randomness and interaction between order…
Spontaneous self-replication in cellular automata has long been considered rare, with most known examples requiring careful design or artificial initialization. In this paper, we present formal, causal evidence that such replication can…
We introduce various models for cellulose bio-degradation by micro-organisms. Those models rely on complex chemical mechanisms, involve the structure of the cellulose chains and are allowed to depend on the phenotypical traits of the…
Collapses of dynamical systems into irrecoverable states are observed in ecosystems, human societies, financial systems and network infrastructures. Despite their widespread occurrence and impact, these events remain largely unpredictable.…
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…
Extremal principles are fundamental in our interpretation of phenomena in nature. One of the best known examples is the second law of thermodynamics, governing most physical and chemical systems and stating the continuous increase of…
We introduce a model of traveling agents ({\it e.g.} frugivorous animals) who feed on randomly located vegetation patches and disperse their seeds, thus modifying the spatial distribution of resources in the long term. It is assumed that…
This work introduces a general multi-level model for self-adaptive systems. A self-adaptive system is seen as composed by two levels: the lower level describing the actual behaviour of the system and the upper level accounting for the…
We develop a ``unified'' model that describes both ``micro'' and ``macro'' evolutions within a single theoretical framework. The eco-system is described as a dynamic network; the population dynamics at each node of this network describes…
In this paper we propose an approach for measuring growth of complexity of emerging patterns in complex systems such as cellular automata. We discuss several ways how a metric for measuring the complexity growth can be defined. This…
We study the stochastic evolution of four species in cyclic competition in a well mixed environment. In systems composed of a finite number $N$ of particles these simple interaction rules result in a rich variety of extinction scenarios,…
We study a probabilistic cellular automaton to describe two population biology problems: the threshold of species coexistence in a predator-prey system and the spreading of an epidemic in a population. By carrying out time-dependent…
Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ("coalescence") as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur's classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such…
For years, a main focus of ecological research has been to better understand the complex dynamical interactions between species which comprise food webs. Using the connectance properties of a widely explored synthetic food web called the…
Many natural processes occur over characteristic spatial and temporal scales. This paper presents tools for (i) flexibly and scalably coarse-graining cellular automata and (ii) identifying which coarse-grainings express an automaton's…