Related papers: Engineering Emergence
Microbial ecosystems exhibit a surprising amount of functionally relevant diversity at all levels of taxonomic resolution, presenting a significant challenge for most modeling frameworks. A long-standing hope of theoretical ecology is that…
Complex systems are characterized by many interacting units that give rise to emergent behavior. A particularly advantageous way to study these systems is through the analysis of the networks that encode the interactions among the system's…
In these notes we review emergent phenomena in complex systems, emphasizing ways to identify potential underlying universal mechanisms that generates complexity. The discussion is centered around the emergence of collective behavior in…
In this work we present a general mechanism by which simple dynamics running on networks become self-organized critical for scale free topologies. We illustrate this mechanism with a simple arithmetic model of division between integers, the…
Robustness is key to engineering, automation, and science as a whole. However, the property of robustness is often underpinned by costly requirements such as over-provisioning, known uncertainty and predictive models, and known adversaries.…
Self-Organization is of growing importance for large distributed computing systems. In these systems, a central control and manual management is exceedingly difficult or even impossible. Emergence is widely recognized as the core principle…
We present a domain-general account of causation that applies to settings in which macro-level causal relations between two systems are of interest, but the relevant causal features are poorly understood and have to be aggregated from vast…
A quite general interaction process of a multi-component system is analysed by the extended effective potential method liberated from usual limitations of perturbation theory or integrable model. The obtained causally complete solution of…
The study of complex systems has produced a huge library of different descriptive statistics that scientists can use to describe the various emergent patterns that characterize complex systems. The problem of engineering systems to display…
We introduce computational causal inference as an interdisciplinary field across causal inference, algorithms design and numerical computing. The field aims to develop software specializing in causal inference that can analyze massive…
We show that fractality in complex networks arises from the geometric self-similarity of their built-in hierarchical community-like structure, which is mathematically described by the scale-invariant equation for the masses of the boxes…
Scale invariance is a central organizing principle in physics, underlying phenomena that range from critical behaviour in statistical mechanics to transport and chaos in nonlinear dynamical systems. Here we present a unified and physically…
We investigate the possible origin of hierarchical structures in complex systems describable in terms of a finite and small number of parameters which control the behavioral pattern at each level of organization. We argue that the…
Recently it has been demonstrated that causal entropic forces can lead to the emergence of complex phenomena associated with human cognitive niche such as tool use and social cooperation. Here I show that even more fundamental traits…
This chapter serves as an introduction to systems engineering focused on the broad issues surrounding realizing complex integrated systems. What is a system? We pose a number of possible definitions and perspectives, but leave open the…
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
It has been claimed that different types of causes must be considered in biological systems, including top-down as well as same-level and bottom-up causation, thus enabling the top levels to be causally efficacious in their own right. To…
After coarse-graining a complex system, the dynamics of its macro-state may exhibit more pronounced causal effects than those of its micro-state. This phenomenon, known as causal emergence, is quantified by the indicator of effective…
Top-down causation has been suggested to occur at all scales of biological organization as a mechanism for explaining the hierarchy of structure and causation in living systems. Here we propose that a transition from bottom-up to top-down…
To analyze the evolutionary emergence of structural complexity in physical processes we introduce a general, but tractable, model of objects that interact to produce new objects. Since the objects--\emph{$epsilon$-machines}--have well…