Related papers: Quantifying Hierarchical Selection
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
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 study systems of interacting reinforced stochastic processes, where agents' decisions evolve under reinforcement, network-mediated interactions, and environmental influences. In competitive environments with irreducible networks, we…
Hierarchical structures are ubiquitous in human and animal societies, but a fundamental understanding of their raison d'\^etre has been lacking. Here, we present a general theory in which hierarchies are obtained as the optimal design that…
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…
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…
The co-evolution of structure and dynamics, known as adaptivity, is a fundamental property in various systems and drives diverse emergent behaviors. However, the adaptivity in previous works is primarily stemmed from pairwise situations,…
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems, which are considered to be robust, self-organising and scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic problems. So, this work is…
According to cognitive psychology and related disciplines, the development of complex problem-solving behaviour in biological agents depends on hierarchical cognitive mechanisms. Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
The efficient use of available resources is a key factor in achieving success on both personal and organizational levels. One of the crucial resources in knowledge economy is time. The ability to force others to adapt to our schedule even…
Constraints placed upon the phenotypes of organisms result from their interactions with the environment. Over evolutionary timescales, these constraints feed back onto smaller molecular subnetworks comprising the organism. The evolution of…
The interaction between natural selection and random mutation is frequently debated in recent years. Does similar dilemma also exist in the evolution of real networks such as biological networks? In this paper, we try to discuss this issue…
Researchers have proposed that the distinction between so-called "simple" and "complex" societies can be expressed by an increase in the number of levels at which functional organization, interaction, and thus selection, operate. In spite…
There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…
The complexity of many biological, social and technological systems stems from the richness of the interactions among their units. Over the past decades, a great variety of complex systems has been successfully described as networks whose…
In this paper we study collective decision making on a multi-population, represented by a regular network of groups of individuals. Each group consists of a collection of players and every player can choose between two options. A group is…
People organize in groups and contagions spread across them. A simple stochastic process, yet complex to model due to dynamical correlations within and between groups. Moreover, groups can evolve if agents join or leave in response to…
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…