Related papers: Combinatory Chemistry: Towards a Simple Model of E…

Interest in high-entropy inorganic compounds originates from their ability to stabilize cations and anions in local environments that rarely occur at standard temperature and pressure. This leads to new crystalline phases in many-cation…

The increasing demands of sustainable energy, electronics, and biomedical applications call for next-generation functional materials with unprecedented properties. Of particular interest are emerging materials that display exceptional…

The design of a complex system warrants a compositional methodology, i.e., composing simple components to obtain a larger system that exhibits their collective behavior in a meaningful way. We propose an automaton-based paradigm for…

Numerical simulations of a simple reaction--diffusion model reveal a surprising variety of irregular spatio--temporal patterns. These patterns arise in response to finite--amplitude perturbations. Some of them resemble the steady irregular…

The use of machine learning algorithms in finance, medicine, and criminal justice can deeply impact human lives. As a consequence, research into interpretable machine learning has rapidly grown in an attempt to better control and fix…

The spontaneous generation of electrical activity underpins a number of essential physiological processes, and is observed even in tissues where specialized pacemaker cells have not been identified. The emergence of periodic oscillations in…

Collective adaptive systems are an emerging class of networked computational systems, particularly suited in application domains such as smart cities, complex sensor networks, and the Internet of Things. These systems tend to feature large…

It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…

We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…

Machine learning has recently emerged as a powerful tool for generating new molecular and material structures. The success of state-of-the-art models stems from their ability to incorporate physical symmetries, such as translation,…

This paper applies Algorithmic Information Theory to simple examples of replication processes to illustrate how replicating structures can generate and maintain order in a non equilibrium system. Variation in replicating structures enhances…

This paper describes a 2D particle system in which autopoietic vesicles that are able to grow, repair, and reproduce can emerge from an initial random distribution of individual components. The reproduction process also exhibits inheritance…

Open-ended evolution requires unbounded possibilities that evolving entities can explore. The cardinality of a set of those possibilities thus has a significant implication for the open-endedness of evolution. We propose that facilitating…

The objective of the paper is to identify laws and mechanisms that allow the creation of more order from disorder using natural means i.e., without the help of conscious beings. While this is not possible for the collection of all dynamical…

We consider an unsupervised classifying agent that evolves by enforcing self-consistency of its labels under continual exposure to a data-generating environment. Because the agent's predictions feed back into its own regularized updates,…

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…

A recombination reaction model for high-temperature chemical kinetics is derived from ab initio simulations data. A kinetic recombination rate model is derived using a recently developed ab initio state-specific dissociation model and the…

We present a spatially-extended system of chemical reactions exhibiting adaptation to time-dependent influxes of reactants. Here adaptation is defined as improved reproductive success, namely the ability of one of the many locally stable…

Combinatorics is a fundamental mathematical discipline as well as an essential component of many mathematical areas, and its study has experienced an impressive growth in recent years. One of the main reasons for this growth is the tight…

Quantum collision models normally consist of a system interacting with a set of ancillary units representing the environment. While these ancillary systems are usually assumed to be either two level systems (TLS) or harmonic oscillators, in…