Related papers: Compressibility, laws of nature, initial condition…
Most work on computational complexity is concerned with time. However this course will try to show that program-size complexity, which measures algorithmic information, is of much greater philosophical significance. I'll discuss how one can…
Component systems - ensembles of realizations built from a shared repertoire of modular parts - are ubiquitous in biological, ecological, technological, and socio-cultural domains. From genomes to texts, cities, and software, these systems…
Aggregation processes with an arbitrary number of conserved quantities are investigated. On the mean-field level, an exact solution for the size distribution is obtained. The asymptotic form of this solution exhibits nontrivial ``double''…
This contribution argues that the notion of time used in the scientific modeling of reality deprives time of its real nature. Difficulties from logic paradoxes to mathematical incompleteness and numerical uncertainty ensue. How can the…
There is no single definition of complexity (Edmonds 1999; Gershenson 2008; Mitchell 2009; De Domenico, et al., 2019), as it acquires different meanings in different contexts. A general notion is the amount of information required to…
Learning is a distinctive feature of intelligent behaviour. High-throughput experimental data and Big Data promise to open new windows on complex systems such as cells, the brain or our societies. Yet, the puzzling success of Artificial…
Complex systems are fascinating because their rich macroscopic properties emerge from the interaction of many simple parts. Understanding the building principles of these emergent phenomena in nature requires assessing natural complex…
The disjunction between nature and science is studied, together with the need to modify the conception of natural science vs artificial science, related to the perspective of objectivity and subjectivity, to end with the explanation of the…
The intuition that a long history is required for the emergence of complexity in natural systems is formalized using the notion of depth. The depth of a system is defined in terms of the number of parallel computational steps needed to…
It is high time to openly and without finalism define the dangerous but needed term 'purposeful information', whose quantity is an Eigen information value. Using the term 'biological information' in its stead forces one into an…
Computational complexity is examined using the principle of increasing entropy. To consider computation as a physical process from an initial instance to the final acceptance is motivated because many natural processes have been recognized…
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…
We discuss the anthropic principle and its implications for our existence and the physical laws which govern the universe. Several amazing coincidences which provide conditions necessary for creation of life suggest that the "laws of…
This has much in common with traditional work in statistics and machine learning. However, there are important new issues which arise because of the sheer size of the data. One of the important problem in data mining is the…
Data-driven decision-making consequential to individuals raises important questions of accountability and justice. Indeed, European law provides individuals limited rights to 'meaningful information about the logic' behind significant,…
This article is a follow-up of a short essay that appeared in Nature 455, 1181 (2008) [arXiv:0810.5306]. It has become increasingly clear that the erratic dynamics of markets is mostly endogenous and not due to the rational processing of…
Simplified mechanistic models in ecology have been criticized for the fact that a good fit to data does not imply the mechanism is true: pattern does not equal process. In parallel, the maximum entropy principle (MaxEnt) has been applied in…
The concept of information has emerged as a language in its own right, bridging several disciplines that analyze natural phenomena and man-made systems. Integrated information has been introduced as a metric to quantify the amount of…
The study of environmentally induced superselection and of the process of decoherence was originally motivated by the search for the emergence of classical behavior out of the quantum substrate, in the macroscopic limit. This limit, and…
The observed general time-asymmetric behavior of macroscopic systems -- embodied in the second law of thermodynamics -- arises naturally from time-symmetric microscopic laws due to the great disparity between macro and micro-scales. More…