Related papers: Fruitful symbioses between termites and computers
Coexistence of individuals with different species or phenotypes is often found in nature in spite of competition between them. Stable coexistence of multiple types of individuals have implications for maintenance of ecological biodiversity…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these…
Recently, computational modelling became a very important research tool that enables us to study problems that for decades evaded scientific analysis. Evolutionary systems are certainly examples of such problems: they are composed of many…
The speed and transformative power of human cultural evolution is evident from the change it has wrought on our planet. This chapter proposes a human computation program aimed at (1) distinguishing algorithmic from non-algorithmic…
Biological neural networks can perform complex computations to predict their environment, far above the limited predictive capabilities of individual neurons. While conventional approaches to understanding these computations often focus on…
Technology is increasingly shaping our social structures and is becoming a driving force in altering human biology. Besides, human activities already proved to have a significant impact on the Earth system which in turn generates complex…
Social insect colonies and ensemble machine learning methods represent two of the most successful examples of decentralized information processing in nature and computation respectively. Here we develop a rigorous mathematical framework…
Coral reefs are crucial to marine biodiversity and rely on a delicate symbiotic relationship between corals and zooxanthellae algae. Water temperature variations, however, disrupt this association, leading to coral bleaching events that…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
Simulations of the coevolution of many interacting species are performed using the Webworld model. The model has a realistic set of predator-prey equations that describe the population dynamics of the species for any structure of the food…
Links in a practical network may have different functions, which makes the original network a combination of some functional subnetworks. Here, by a model of coupled oscillators, we investigate how such functional subnetworks are evolved…
Self-organizing complex systems typically are comprised of a large number of frequently similar components or events. Through their process, a pattern at the global-level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the…
The living organism is considered as an open system, whereas Prigogine's approach to the thermodynamics of such systems is used. The approach allows one to formulate the law of individual growth and development (ontogenesis) of the living…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
In the light of current scientific assessments of human-induced climate change, we investigate an experimental model to inform how resource-use strategies may influence interplanetary and interstellar colonisation by intelligent…
A novel mathematical framework is proposed to describe the ecological and evolutionary consequences of consumer--resource interactions. Both the consumer and resource are assumed to consist of several (sub)species, which interact between…
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…
Basic problems in complex systems are surveyed in connection with Life. As a key issue for complex systems, complementarity between syntax/rule/parts and semantics/behavior/whole is stressed. To address the issue, a constructive approach…
In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…