Related papers: The dynamical regime and its importance for evolva…
It has long been hypothesized that operating close to the critical state is beneficial for natural, artificial and their evolutionary systems. We put this hypothesis to test in a system of evolving foraging agents controlled by neural…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
The hypothesis that living systems can benefit from operating at the vicinity of critical points has gained momentum in recent years. Criticality may confer an optimal balance between exceedingly ordered and too noisy states. We here…
Criticality has been proposed as a key principle underlying complex behavior in biological and artificial systems; however, how criticality translates from individual dynamics to collective behavior remains unclear. We study this question…
Systems that exhibit complex behaviours are often found in a particular dynamical condition, poised between order and disorder. This observation is at the core of the so-called criticality hypothesis, which states that systems in a…
Many biological and cognitive systems do not operate deep within one or other regime of activity. Instead, they are poised at critical points located at phase transitions in their parameter space. The pervasiveness of criticality suggests…
The dynamics of protection processes has been a fundamental challenge in systemic risk analysis. The conceptual principle and methodological techniques behind the mechanisms involved [in such dynamics] have been harder to grasp than…
Living systems such as neuronal networks and animal groups process information about their environment via the dynamics of interacting units. These can transition between distinct macroscopic behaviors. Near such a transition (or critical…
This paper studies a stylized model of local interaction where agents choose from an ever increasing set of vertically ranked actions, e.g. technologies. The driving forces of the model are infrequent upward shifts (``updates''), followed…
According to the criticality hypothesis, collective biological systems should operate in a special parameter region, close to so-called critical points, where the collective behavior undergoes a qualitative change between different…
Social movements, neurons in the brain or even industrial suppliers are best described by agents evolving on networks with basic interaction rules. In these real systems, the connectivity between agents corresponds to the a critical state…
Experiments suggest that cerebral cortex gains several functional advantages by operating in a dynamical regime near the critical point of a phase transition. However, a long-standing criticism of this hypothesis is that critical dynamics…
Living systems operate in a critical dynamical regime -- between order and chaos -- where they are both resilient to perturbation, and flexible enough to evolve. To characterize such critical dynamics, the established 'structural theory' of…
Real-world optimisation problems are often dynamic. Previously good solutions must be updated or replaced due to changes in objectives and constraints. It is often claimed that evolutionary algorithms are particularly suitable for dynamic…
The vicinity of phase transitions selectively amplifies weak stimuli, yielding optimal sensitivity to distinguish external input. Along with this enhanced sensitivity, enhanced levels of fluctuations at criticality reduce the specificity of…
Collective behaviors exhibited by animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, or insect swarms are fascinating examples of self-organization in biology. Concepts and methods from statistical physics have been used to argue…
There is mounting empirical evidence that many communities of living organisms display key features which closely resemble those of physical systems at criticality. We here introduce a minimal model framework for the dynamics of a community…
Learning and adaptation play great role in emergent socio-economic phenomena. Complex dynamics has been previously found in the systems of multiple learning agents interacting via a simple game. Meanwhile, the single agent adaptation is…
We discuss the feasibility of predicting, managing and subsequently manipulating, the future evolution of a Complex Adaptive System. Our archetypal system mimics a population of adaptive, interacting objects, such as those arising in the…