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Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…
Swarm robotics has potential for a wide variety of applications, but real-world deployments remain rare due to the difficulty of predicting emergent behaviors arising from simple local interactions. Traditional engineering approaches design…
Since the time of Darwin, scientists have struggled to reconcile the evolution of biological forms in a universe determined by fixed laws. These laws underpin the origin of life, evolution, human culture and technology, as set by the…
Human-created engines and evolutionarily optimized molecular motors exhibit sophisticated design in order to harvest chemical or thermal energy for generating unidirectional motion. The complexity of these motors makes their random…
The Boltzmann model for the random generation of "decomposable" combinatorial structures is a set of techniques that allows for efficient random sampling algorithms for a large class of families of discrete objects. The usual requirement of…
Chemical processes in closed systems are poorly controllable since they always relax to equilibrium. Living systems avoid this fate and give rise to a much richer diversity of phenomena by operating under nonequilibrium conditions. Recent…
In this article we review classical and recent results in anomalous diffusion and provide mechanisms useful for the study of the fundamentals of certain processes, mainly in condensed matter physics, chemistry and biology. Emphasis will be…
We propose a minimal model of the dynamics of diversity -- replicator equations with extinction, invasion and mutation. We numerically study the behavior of this simple model and show that it displays completely different behavior from the…
Patterns are ubiquitous in nature, but how they form is often unclear. Turing developed a seminal theory to explain patterns based on reactions that counteract the equalizing tendency of diffusion. These reactions require continuous energy…
We construct a simple model of a proto-cell that simulates a stochastic dynamics of abstract chemicals on a two-dimensional lattice. We assume that chemicals catalyze their reproduction through interaction with each other, and that between…
The major challenge in designing a discriminative learning algorithm for predicting structured data is to address the computational issues arising from the exponential size of the output space. Existing algorithms make different assumptions…
A thorough in situ characterization of materials at extreme conditions is challenging, and computational tools such as crystal structural search methods in combination with ab initio calculations are widely used to guide experiments by…
Evolution is often understood through genetic mutations driving changes in an organism's fitness, but there is potential to extend this understanding beyond the genetic code. We propose that natural products - complex molecules central to…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…
Modern ecology has re-emphasized the need for a quantitative understanding of the original 'survival of the fittest theme' based on analyzis of the intricate trade-offs between competing evolutionary strategies that characterize the…
We explore the evolution of cooperation in the framework of the evolutionary game theory using the prisoner's dilemma as metaphor of the problem. We present a minimal model taking into account the growing process of the systems and…
Modeling potential alloys requires the exploration of all possible configurations of atoms. Additionally, modeling the thermal properties of materials requires knowledge of the possible ways of displacing the atoms. One solution to finding…
Spontaneous self-assembly in molecular systems is a fundamental route to both biological and engineered soft matter. Simple micellisation, emulsion formation, and polymer mixing principles are well understood. However, the principles behind…
The origin of life is often approached through the lens of replication, heredity, or molecular specificity. This paper proposes a thermodynamic framework in which the emergence of life is driven by the persistence of reaction pathways that…