Related papers: Evolutionary Mechanics: new engineering principles…
The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
Here we propose a generic mechanism - networked buffering - for generating robust traits in complex systems that requires two basic conditions to be satisfied: 1) agents are versatile enough to perform more than one single functional role…
Understanding how systems can be designed to be evolvable is fundamental to research in optimization, evolution, and complex systems science. Many researchers have thus recognized the importance of evolvability, i.e. the ability to find new…
The growth of world population, limitation of resources, economic problems and environmental issues force engineers to develop increasingly efficient solutions for logistic systems. Pure optimization for efficiency, however, has often led…
What makes living systems flexible so that they can react quickly and adapt easily to changing environments? This question has not only engaged biologists for decades but is also of great interest to computer scientists and engineers who…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
Degeneracy is the ability of structurally different elements to perform the same function or yield the same output under certain constraints. In contrast to redundancy, which implies identical backups, degeneracy allows diverse components…
Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological systems naturally exhibit robustness, there is no…
"Evolution behaves like a tinkerer" (Francois Jacob, Science, 1977). Software systems provide a unique opportunity to understand biological processes using concepts from network theory. The Debian GNU/Linux operating system allows us to…
When a biological system robustly corrects component-level errors, the direct pressure on component performance declines. Components may become less reliable, maintain more genetic variability, or drift neutrally in design, creating the…
Emergence is a phenomenon taken for granted in science but also still not well understood. We have developed a model of artificial genetic evolution intended to allow for emergence on genetic, population and social levels. We present the…
Biological networks have evolved to be highly functional within uncertain environments while remaining extremely adaptable. One of the main contributors to the robustness and evolvability of biological networks is believed to be their…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
Living organisms, ecosystems, and social systems are examples of complex systems in which robustness against inclusion of new elements is an essential feature. A recently proposed simple model has revealed a general mechanism by which such…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
When developing autonomous systems, engineers and other stakeholders make great effort to prepare the system for all foreseeable events and conditions. However, these systems are still bound to encounter events and conditions that were not…
Criticality has been proposed as a mechanism for the emergence of complexity, life, and computation, as it exhibits a balance between robustness and adaptability. In classic models of complex systems where structure and dynamics are…