Related papers: Pervasive Flexibility in Living Technologies throu…
Engineered systems are designed to deftly operate under predetermined conditions yet are notoriously fragile when unexpected perturbations arise. In contrast, biological systems operate in a highly flexible manner; learn quickly adequate…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic…
Creating autonomous, self-supporting, self-replicating, sustainable systems is a great challenge. To some extent, understanding life means not only being able to create it from scratch, but also improving, supporting, saving it, or even…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
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…
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…
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…
We propose a Capabilities-based approach for building long-lived, complex systems that have lengthy development cycles. User needs and technology evolve during these extended development periods, and thereby, inhibit a fixed…
Evolution in time-varying environments naturally leads to adaptable biological systems that can easily switch functionalities. Advances in the synthesis of environmentally-responsive materials therefore open up the possibility of creating a…
"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…
Urban growth sometimes leads to rigid infrastructure that struggles to adapt to changing demand. This paper introduces a novel approach, aiming to enable cities to evolve and respond more effectively to such dynamic demand. It identifies…
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…
The present article introduces a reference framework for discussing resilience of computational systems. Rather than a property that may or may not be exhibited by a system, resilience is interpreted here as the emerging result of a dynamic…