Related papers: Phase Transitions and Criticality in the Collectiv…
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…
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…
The spontaneous organization of collective activities in animal groups and societies has attracted a considerable amount of attention over the last decade. This kind of coordination often permits group-living species to achieve collective…
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…
Many-variable differential equations with random coefficients provide powerful models for the dynamics of many interacting species in ecology. These models are known to exhibit a dynamical phase transition from a phase where population…
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 spacially extended model of the collective behavior of a large number of locally acting organisms is proposed in which organisms move probabilistically between local cells in space, but with weights dependent on local morphogenetic…
Over the last decade new technologies for making large numbers of fine-grained measurements have led to the surprising discovery that many biological systems sit near a critical point. These systems are potentially more adaptive in that…
It is highly believed that the individuals' mobility plays an important role in phase transition in animal collective motion. Here, we propose a model to study the effects of individuals' mobility in a distributed animal collective…
Collective behaviour is a widespread phenomenon in biology, cutting through a huge span of scales, from cell colonies up to bird flocks and fish schools. The most prominent trait of collective behaviour is the emergence of global order:…
Natural flocks (aligned) and swarms (non-aligned) both exhibit features of near-criticality, challenging their treatment as two ends of the same phase transition. We present a model for the aggregation of active individuals, in which their…
From flocking birds to schooling fish, organisms interact to form collective dynamics across the natural world. Self-organization is present at smaller scales as well: cells interact and move during development to produce patterns in fish…
An important characteristic of flocks of birds, school of fish, and many similar assemblies of self-propelled particles is the emergence of states of collective order in which the particles move in the same direction. When noise is added…
The existing consensus is that flocks are poised at criticality, entailing long correlation lengths and a maximal value of Shannon mutual information in the large-system limit. We show, by contrast, that for finite flocks in the long…
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…
Group behavior has received much attention as a test case of self-organization. There has been much written in recent years to investigate interactions within groups of agents. These agents can be animals moving in an interactive way, such…
At the point of a second order phase transition also termed as a critical point, systems display long range order and their macroscopic behaviors are independent of the microscopic details making up the system. Due to these properties, it…
Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such scale-free patterns were identified experimentally in many…
Animals living in groups make movement decisions that depend, among other factors, on social interactions with other group members. Our present understanding of social rules in animal collectives is mainly based on empirical fits to…
Self-organized criticality is a well-established phenomenon, where a system dynamically tunes its structure to operate on the verge of a phase transition. Here, we show that the dynamics inside the self-organized critical state are…