Related papers: Designing complex behaviors using transition-based…
An autocatalytic pattern matching polymer system is studied as an abstract model for chemical ecosystem evolution. Highly ordered populations with particular sequence patterns appear spontaneously out of a vast number of possible states.…
Allostery plays a fundament role in most biological processes. However, little theory is available to describe it outside of two-state models. Here we use a statistical mechanical approach to show that the allosteric coupling between two…
Proteins often regulate their activities via allostery - or action at a distance - in which the binding of a ligand at one binding site influences the affinity for another ligand at a distal site. Although less studied than in proteins,…
What makes living systems flexible so that they can react quickly and adapt easily to changing environments? This question has not only engaged biologists for decades but is also of great interest to computer scientists and engineers who…
We argue that the coordination of the activities of individual complex agents enables a system to develop and sustain complexity at a higher level. We exemplify relevant mechanisms through computer simulations of a toy system, a coupled map…
Proteins display generic properties that are challenging to explain by direct selection, notably allostery, the capacity to be regulated through long-range effects, and evolvability, the capacity to adapt to new selective pressures. An…
Autocatalytic sets are sets of entities that mutually catalyse each other's production through chemical reactions from a basic food source. Recently, the reflexively autocatalytic and food generated theory has introduced a formal definition…
Understanding how the structure of community interactions is modified by coevolution is vital for understanding system responses to change at all scales. However, in absence of a group selection process, collective community behaviours…
We simulate crystallisation of hard spheres with short-ranged attractive potentials, as a model self-assembling system. We show how measurements of correlation and response functions during assembly can be used to tune the interaction…
Self-assembly is a fundamental concept in biology and of significant interest to nanotechnology. Significant progress has been made in characterizing and controlling the properties of the resulting structures, both experimentally and…
Collective adaptive systems are new emerging computational systems consisting of a large number of interacting components and featuring complex behaviour. These systems are usually distributed, heterogeneous, decentralised and…
Bursty dynamics is a common temporal property of various complex systems in Nature but it also characterises the dynamics of human actions and interactions. At the phenomenological level it is a feature of all systems that evolve…
Allostasis proposes that long-term viability of a living system is achieved through anticipatory adjustments of its physiology and behaviour: emphasising physiological and affective stress as an adaptive state of adaptation that minimizes…
Active solids combine internal active driving with elasticity to realize states with nonequilibrium mechanics and autonomous motion. They are often studied in overdamped settings, e.g., in soft materials, and the role of inertia is less…
Biological systems exploit self-assembly to create complex structures whose arrangements are finely controlled from molecular to mesoscopic level. Herein we report an example of using fully synthetic systems that mimic two levels of…
To meet the demands for more adaptable and expedient approaches to augment both research and manufacturing, we report an autonomous system using real-time in-situ characterization and an autonomous, decision-making processer based on an…
Multi-agent systems in biology, society, and engineering are capable of making decisions through the dynamic interaction of their elements. Nonlinearity of the interactions is key for the speed, robustness, and flexibility of multi-agent…
Cellular regulatory dynamics is driven by large and intricate networks of interactions at the molecular scale, whose sheer size obfuscates understanding. In light of limited experimental data, many parameters of such dynamics are unknown,…
We examine the feasibility of predicting and subsequently managing the future evolution of a Complex Adaptive System. Our archetypal system mimics a competitive population of mechanical, biological, informational or human objects. We show…
Until recently, research into the sustainable design of interactive systems has primarily focused on the direct material impact of a system, through improving its energy efficiency and optimizing its lifecycle. Yet the way a system is…