Related papers: Engineering Emergence
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…
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…
Spontaneous self-assembly in molecular systems is a fundamental route to both biological and engineered soft matter. Simple micellisation, emulsion formation, and polymer mixing principles are well understood. However, the principles behind…
The dynamics based on information transfer is proposed as an underlying mechanism for the scale-invariant dynamic critical behavior observed in a variety of systems. We apply the dynamics to the globally-coupled Ising model, which is…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…
The emergence of large scale structures in biological systems, and in particular the formation of lines of hierarchy, is observed in many scales, from collections of cells to groups of insects to herds of animals. Motivated by phenomena in…
Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…
This paper describes serial and parallel compositional models of multiple objects with part sharing. Objects are built by part-subpart compositions and expressed in terms of a hierarchical dictionary of object parts. These parts are…
Identifying and explaining the structure of complex networks at different scales has become an important problem across disciplines. At the mesoscale, modular architecture has attracted most of the attention. At the macroscale, other…
Causal reasoning is essential for understanding decision-making about the behaviour of complex `ecosystems' of systems that underpin modern society, with security -- including issues around correctness, safety, resilience, etc. -- typically…
Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…
Building resilience into today's complex infrastructures is critical to the daily functioning of society and its ability to withstand and recover from natural disasters, epidemics, and cyber-threats. This study proposes quantitative…
Based on laboratory based growth of plant-like structures from inorganic materials, we present new theory for the emergence of plant structure at a range of scales dictated by levels of ionization (charge density), which can be traced…
Empirical complex systems can be characterized not only by pairwise interactions, but also by higher-order (group) interactions influencing collective phenomena, from metabolic reactions to epidemics. Nevertheless, higher-order networks'…
In this paper, we pose a hypothesis that the structure of communities in complex networks may result from their latent fractal properties. This hypothesis is based not only on the general observation that many real networks have multilevel…
The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic…
Diversity is a fundamental feature of ecosystems, even when the concept of ecosystem is extended to sociology or economics. Diversity can be intended as the count of different items, animals, or, more generally, interactions. There are two…
Scale independence is a ubiquitous feature of complex systems which implies a highly skewed distribution of resources with no characteristic scale. Research has long focused on why systems as varied as protein networks, evolution and stock…
The richness of many complex systems stems from the interactions among their components. The higher-order nature of these interactions, involving many units at once, and their temporal dynamics constitute crucial properties that shape the…
Networks are a fundamental tool for understanding and modeling complex systems in physics, biology, neuroscience, engineering, and social science. Many networks are known to exhibit rich, lower-order connectivity patterns that can be…