Related papers: Free Will and Falling Cats
This article presents a formal model demonstrating that genuine autonomy, the ability of a system to self-regulate and pursue objectives, fundamentally implies computational unpredictability from an external perspective. we establish…
Most aquatic vertebrates swim by lateral flapping of their bodies and caudal fins. While much effort has been devoted to understanding the flapping kinematics and its influence on the swimming efficiency, little is known about the stability…
Hallmarks of quantum mechanics include superposition and entanglement. In the context of large complex systems, these features should lead to situations like Schrodinger's cat, which exists in a superposition of alive and dead states…
Quadrupeds transition spontaneously to various gait patterns (e.g., walk, trot, pace, gallop) in response to the locomotion speed. The generation of these gait patterns has been the subject of debate for a long time. We propose a coupled…
An unmanned deformable vehicle is a wheel-legged robot transforming between two configurations: vehicular and humanoid states, with different motion modes and stability characteristics. To address motion stability in multiple…
Three reasonable hypotheses lead to the thesis that physical phenomena can be described and simulated with cellular automata. In this work, we attempt to describe the motion of a particle upon which a constant force is applied, with a…
A generalization of the notion of an $\infty$-category is presented, allowing for ($\infty$-)cat(egorie)s that may have non-invertible higher morphisms.
A lattice walk model is said to be reluctant if the defining step set has a strong drift towards the boundaries. We describe efficient random generation strategies for these walks.
We introduce a toy model of the "rat race" in which individuals try to better themselves relative to the rest of the population. An individual is characterized by a real-valued fitness and each advances at a constant rate by an amount that…
This work briefly covers our efforts to stabilize the flight dynamics of Northeastern's tailless bat-inspired micro aerial vehicle, Aerobat. Flapping robots are not new. A plethora of examples is mainly dominated by insect-style design…
The issue of whether we make decisions freely has vexed philosophers for millennia, Resolving this is vital for solving a diverse range of problems, from the physiology of how the brain makes decisions (and how we assign moral…
User-driven applications belong to the new type of programs, in which users get the full control of WHAT, WHEN, and HOW must appear on the screen. Such programs can exist only if the screen view is organized not according with the…
Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…
When a falling ball chain strikes a surface, a tension is created that pulls the chain downward. This causes a downward acceleration that is larger than free-fall, which has been observed by recent experiments. Here a theoretical…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
There is widespread disagreement about how the general covariance of a theory affects its quantization. Without a complete quantum theory of gravity, one can examine quantum consequences of coordinate choices only in highly idealized `toy'…
Using a simple model for the trail formation of ants, the relation between i)the schedule of feeding which represents the unsteady natural environment, ii)emerging patterns of trails connecting a nest with food resources, and iii)the…
Quadruped animals are capable of exhibiting a diverse range of locomotion gaits. While progress has been made in demonstrating such gaits on robots, current methods rely on motion priors, dynamics models, or other forms of extensive manual…
Self-organized robots may develop attracting states within the sensorimotor loop, that is within the phase space of neural activity, body, and environmental variables. Fixpoints, limit cycles, and chaotic attractors correspond in this…
In this paper we re-investigate the core of Schroedinger's 'cat paradox'. We argue that one has to distinguish clearly between superpositions of macroscopic cat states and superpositions of entangled states which comprise both the state of…