Related papers: Critical numerosity in collective behavior
From the formation of ice in small clusters of water molecules to the mass raids of army ant colonies, the emergent behavior of collectives depends critically on their size. At the same time, common wisdom holds that such behaviors are…
How can minorities of individuals overturn social conventions? The theory of critical mass states that when a committed minority reaches a critical size, a cascade of behavioural changes can occur, overturning apparently stable social…
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…
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…
Recent experimental results based on multi-electrode and imaging techniques have reinvigorated the idea that large neural networks operate near a critical point, between order and disorder. However, evidence for criticality has relied on…
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…
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…
We have numerically studied the trapping problem in a two-dimensional lattice where particles are continuously generated. We have introduced interaction between particles and directionality of their movement. This model presents a critical…
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…
We study the collective behaviour of an ensemble of coupled motile elements whose interactions depend on time and are alternatively attractive or repulsive. The evolution of interactions is driven by individual internal variables with…
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…
To understand the onset of collective motion, we investigate active systems where particles switch on and off their self-propulsion. We prove that even when the only possible transition is off$\to$on, an active 2-state system behaves as an…
Criticality has been proposed as a mechanism for the emergence of complexity, life, and computation, as it exhibits a balance between robustness and adaptability. In classic models of complex systems where structure and dynamics are…
We have studied the collective behavior of a population of integrate-and-fire oscillators. We show that diversity, introduced in terms of a random distribution of natural periods, is the mechanism that permits to observe self-organized…
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…
We consider the relation between three physical problems: 2D directed lattice random walks, ensembles of $T_{n,n+1}$ torus knots, and instanton ensembles in 5D SQED with one compact dimension in $\Omega$ background and with 5D Chern-Simons…
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…
We present a novel descriptor for crowd behavior analysis and anomaly detection. The goal is to measure by appropriate patterns the speed of formation and disintegration of groups in the crowd. This descriptor is inspired by the concept of…
Adaptive quantum circuits-where a quantum many-body state is controlled using measurements and conditional unitary operations-are a powerful paradigm for state preparation and quantum error correction tasks. They can support two types of…