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Describing complex phenomena by means of cellular automata (CA) has shown to be a very effective approach in pure and applied sciences. In fact, the number of published papers concerning this topic has tremendously increased over the last…

Cellular Automata and Lattice Gases · Physics 2012-06-13 Luan Carlos de Sena Monteiro Ozelim , André Luís Brasil Cavalcante , Lucas Parreira de Faria Borges

We introduce a class of stochastic models for the dynamics of two linguistic variants that are competing to become the single, shared convention within an unstructured community of speakers. Different instances of the model are…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-05-20 R. A. Blythe

The game dynamical equations are derived from Boltzmann-like equations for individual pair interactions by assuming a certain kind of imitation behavior, the so-called proportional imitation rule. They can be extended to a stochastic…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Dirk Helbing

We study a deliberately simple, fully non-linguistic model of text: a sequence of independent draws from a finite alphabet of letters plus a single space symbol. A word is defined as a maximal block of non-space symbols. Within this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Vladimir Berman

Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Richard A Blythe , William Croft

Physics seeks to uncover the laws of Nature and express them through mathematical equations. Despite the vast diversity of natural phenomena, physical equations exhibit structural regularities that set them apart from arbitrary mathematical…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-05-11 Andrei Constantin , Deaglan Bartlett , Harry Desmond , Pedro G. Ferreira

We present a mathematical formulation of a theory of language change. The theory is evolutionary in nature and has close analogies with theories of population genetics. The mathematical structure we construct similarly has correspondences…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-05-28 G. J. Baxter , R. A. Blythe , W. Croft , A. J. McKane

The intrinsic stochasticity of gene expression can lead to large variations in protein levels across a population of cells. To explain this variability, different sources of mRNA fluctuations ('Poisson' and 'Telegraph' processes) have been…

Biological Physics · Physics 2011-03-02 Vlad Elgart , Tao Jia , Rahul V. Kulkarni

We review the mathematical formalism underlying the modelling of stochasticity in biological systems. Beginning with a description of the system in terms of its basic constituents, we derive the mesoscopic equations governing the dynamics…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2012-11-05 Alan J. McKane , Tommaso Biancalani , Tim Rogers

Zipf's law states that sequential frequencies of words in a text correspond to a power function. Its probabilistic model is an infinite urn scheme with asymptotically power distribution. The exponent of this distribution must be estimated.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-06-15 Mikhail Chebunin , Artyom Kovalevskii

Einstein's explanation of Brownian motion provided one of the cornerstones which underlie the modern approaches to stochastic processes. His approach is based on a random walk picture and is valid for Markovian processes lacking long-term…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-10 I. M. Sokolov , J. Klafter

Taylors Law (TL) describes the scaling relationship between the mean and variance of populations as a power-law. TL is widely observed in ecological systems across space and time with exponents varying largely between 1 and 2. Many…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2015-02-24 Xiao Xiao , Kenneth J. Locey , Ethan P. White

Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…

We present certain mathematical aspects of an information method which was formulated in an attempt to investigate diffusion phenomena. We imagine a regular dynamical hamiltonian systems under the random perturbation of thermal (molecular)…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Qiuping A. Wang , Wei Li

We study the short-time asymptotical behavior of stochastic flows on \mathbb{R} in the \sup-norm. The results are stated in terms of a Gaussian process associated with the covariation of the flow. In case the Gaussian process has a…

Probability · Mathematics 2010-10-27 Alexander Shamov

The word-frequency distribution provides the fundamental building blocks that generate discourse in language. It is well known, from empirical evidence, that the word-frequency distribution of almost any text is described by Zipf's law, at…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-11-09 Alvaro Corral , Montserrat Garcia del Muro

Observation of phenotypic diversity in a population of genetically identical cells is often linked to the stochastic nature of chemical reactions involved in gene regulatory networks. We investigate the distribution of population averaged…

Molecular Networks · Quantitative Biology 2015-06-18 Bhaswati Bhattacharyya , Ziya Kalay

Two models of binary fragmentation are introduced in which a time dependent transition size produces two regions of fragment sizes above and below the transition size. In the models we consider a fixed rate of fragmentation for the largest…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-10-31 Z. Tavassoli , A. Esmaeilnia Shirvani

Advances in neural variational inference have facilitated the learning of powerful directed graphical models with continuous latent variables, such as variational autoencoders. The hope is that such models will learn to represent rich,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-09-26 Iulian V. Serban , Alexander G. Ororbia , Joelle Pineau , Aaron Courville

The stochastic solution to diffusion equations with polynomial coefficients is called a Pearson diffusion. If the time derivative is replaced by a distributed fractional derivative, the stochastic solution is called a fractional Pearson…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-11-29 Jebessa B. Mijena , Erkan Nane