Related papers: A Creepy World
This review is a partial synthesis of the book ``Why stock market crash'' (Princeton University Press, January 2003), which presents a general theory of financial crashes and of stock market instabilities that his co-workers and the author…
Bifurcations can cause dynamical systems with slowly varying parameters to transition to far-away attractors. The terms ``critical transition'' or ``tipping point'' have been used to describe this situation. Critical transitions have been…
The thermally activated creep motion of an elastic interface weakly driven on a disordered landscape is one of the best examples of glassy universal dynamics. Its understanding has evolved over the last 30 years thanks to a fruitful…
The concept of (auto)catalytic systems has become a cornerstone in understanding evolutionary processes in various fields. The common ground is the observation that for the production of new species/goods/ideas/elements etc. the…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
We describe a financial market model which shows a non-equilibrium phase transition. Near the transition punctuated equilibrium behaviour is seen, with avalanches occuring on all scales. This scaling is described by an exponent very near 1.…
Living systems adapt to various environmental conditions by changing their internal states. Inspired by gene expression and epigenetic modification dynamics, we herein propose a generic mechanism for adaptation by combining fast oscillatory…
We propose a generic model of eco-systems, with a {\it hierarchical} food web structure. In our computer simulations we let the eco-system evolve continuously for so long that that we can monitor extinctions as well as speciations over…
Evolutionary game theory is a framework to formalize the evolution of collectives ("populations") of competing agents that are playing a game and, after every round, update their strategies to maximize individual payoffs. There are two…
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…
We investigate the impact of an exogenous environment on the emergence of social herding of economic sentiment. An interactions-driven dynamics of economic sentiment is modeled by an Ising model on a large (two-dimensional) square lattice.…
Oft-cited causes of mini-flash crashes include human errors, endogenous feedback loops, the nature of modern liquidity provision, fundamental value shocks, and market fragmentation. We develop a mathematical model which captures aspects of…
Complex systems throughout Nature display structures and functions that are built and maintained, at least in part, by optimal energies flowing through them--not specific, ideal values, rather ranges in energy rate density below which…
A strong analogy is found between the evolution of localized disturbances in extended chaotic systems and the propagation of fronts separating different phases. A condition for the evolution to be controlled by nonlinear mechanisms is…
From the climate system to the effect of the internet on society, chaotic systems appear to have a significant role in our future. Here a method of statistical learning for a class of chaotic systems is described along with underlying…
Multistability is a ubiquitous feature in systems of geophysical relevance and provides key challenges for our ability to predict a system's response to perturbations. Near critical transitions small causes can lead to large effects and -…
Unambiguous identification of the rewards driving behaviours of entities operating in complex open-ended real-world environments is difficult, partly because goals and associated behaviours emerge endogenously and are dynamically updated as…
There has been a long debate on how new levels of organization have evolved. It might seem unlikely, as cooperation must prevail over competition. One well-studied example is the emergence of autocatalytic sets, which seem to be a…
Crashes have fascinated and baffled many canny observers of financial markets. In the strict orthodoxy of the efficient market theory, crashes must be due to sudden changes of the fundamental valuation of assets. However, detailed empirical…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…