Related papers: How many more is different?

Many-variable differential equations with random coefficients provide powerful models for the dynamics of many interacting species in ecology. These models are known to exhibit a dynamical phase transition from a phase where population…

Natural collectives, despite comprising individuals who may not know their numerosity, can exhibit behaviors that depend sensitively on it. This paper proves that the collective behavior of number-oblivious individuals can even have a…

How can minorities of individuals overturn social conventions? The theory of critical mass states that when a committed minority reaches a critical size, a cascade of behavioural changes can occur, overturning apparently stable social…

The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…

A large variety of complex systems in ecology, climate science, biomedicine and engineering have been observed to exhibit tipping points, where the internal dynamical state of the system abruptly changes. For example, such critical…

Identifying and quantifying factors influencing human decision making remains an outstanding challenge, impacting the performance and predictability of social and technological systems. In many cases, system failures are traced to human…

Critical transitions occur in a wide variety of applications including mathematical biology, climate change, human physiology and economics. Therefore it is highly desirable to find early-warning signs. We show that it is possible to…

Criticality has been proposed as a key principle underlying complex behavior in biological and artificial systems; however, how criticality translates from individual dynamics to collective behavior remains unclear. We study this question…

Quantifying uncertainties in collective human behavior and decision making is crucial for ensuring public health and safety, enabling effective disaster response, informing the design of transportation and communication networks, and…

Academic research groups are treated as complex systems and their cooperative behaviour is analysed from a mathematical and statistical viewpoint. Contrary to the naive expectation that the quality of a research group is simply given by the…

Over the last decade new technologies for making large numbers of fine-grained measurements have led to the surprising discovery that many biological systems sit near a critical point. These systems are potentially more adaptive in that…

Identifying factors that affect human decision making and quantifying their influence remain essential and challenging tasks for the design and implementation of social and technological communication systems. We report results of a…

Changes in human behavior are increasingly recognized as a major determinant of epidemic dynamics. Although collective activity can be modified through imposed measures to control epidemic progression, spontaneous changes can also arise as…

Collective behaviours often need to be expressed through numerical features, e.g., for classification or imitation learning. This problem is often addressed by proposing an ad-hoc feature set for a particular swarm behaviour context,…

Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…

Despite recent advances in uncovering the quantitative features of stationary human activity patterns, many applications, from pandemic prediction to emergency response, require an understanding of how these patterns change when the…

Decades of research suggest that information exchange in groups and organizations can reliably improve judgment accuracy in tasks such as financial forecasting, market research, and medical decision-making. However, we show that improving…

Collective behaviors exhibited by animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, or insect swarms are fascinating examples of self-organization in biology. Concepts and methods from statistical physics have been used to argue…

We show that accounting for internal character among interacting, heterogeneous entities generates rich phase transition behavior between isolation and cohesive dynamical grouping. Our analytical and numerical calculations reveal different…

A key question concerning collective decisions is whether a social system can settle on the best available option when some members learn from others instead of evaluating the options on their own. This question is challenging to study, and…