Related papers: Emergence in artificial life
One thing that discriminates living things from inanimate matter is their ability to generate similarly complex or non-random architectures in a large abundance. From DNA sequences to folded protein structures, living cells, microbial…
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…
This work concerns a many-body deterministic model that displays life-like properties as emergence, complexity, self-organization, spontaneous compartmentalization, and self-regulation. The model portraits the dynamics of an ensemble of…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
This chapter reviews measures of emergence, self-organization, complexity, homeostasis, and autopoiesis based on information theory. These measures are derived from proposed axioms and tested in two case studies: random Boolean networks and…
Order can spontaneously emerge from seemingly noisy interactions between biological agents, like a flock of birds changing their direction of flight in unison, without a leader or an external cue. We are interested in the generic conditions…
We present a theoretical as well as experimental investigation of a population of self-replicating segments of code subject to random mutation and survival of the fittest. Under the assumption that such a system constitutes a minimal system…
Discovered by Christopher Alexander, living structure is a physical phenomenon, through which the quality of the built environment or artifacts can be judged objectively. It bears two distinguished properties just like a tree: "far more…
This article investigates emergence and complexity in complex systems that can share information on a network. To this end, we use a theoretical approach from information theory, computability theory, and complex networks. One key studied…
Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…
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…
Current artificial intelligence systems show near-human-level capabilities when deployed in isolation. Systems of a few collaborating intelligent agents are being engineered to perform tasks collectively. This raises the question of whether…
This thesis broadly concerns the origins of life problem, pursuing a joint approach that combines general philosophical/conceptual reflection on the problem along with more detailed and formal scientific modelling work oriented in the…
The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
One may define a complex system as a system in which phenomena emerge as a consequence of multiscale interaction among the system's components and their environments. The field of Complex Systems is the study of such systems--usually…
We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…
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…
Biological systems exhibit large-scale self-organized dynamics and structures which enable organisms to perform the functions of life. The field of active matter strives to develop and understand microscopically-driven nonequilibrium…
The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…