Related papers: How many more is different?
Collective decision-making arises from individual agents integrating their own personal observations with information obtained from social partners. In many biological systems that exhibit collective decision-making, the process by which…
Abrupt shifts in ecosystems, brains, markets, and climate are often diagnosed as signs of approaching a tipping point, i.e. a critical bifurcation where stability is lost. Here we reveal a broader and more deceptive mechanism:…
We study diffusion-controlled two-species annihilation with a finite number of particles. In this stochastic process, particles move diffusively, and when two particles of opposite type come into contact, the two annihilate. We focus on the…
Bifurcations can cause dynamical systems with slowly varying parameters to transition to far-away attractors. The terms ``critical transition'' or ``tipping point'' have been used to describe this situation. Critical transitions have been…
Cooperation is central to the success of human societies as it is crucial for overcoming some of the most pressing social challenges of our time. Yet how human cooperation is achieved and may persist is still a main puzzle in the social and…
Collective motion is an ubiquitous phenomenon in nature, inspiring engineers, physicists and mathematicians to develop mathematical models and bio-inspired designs. Collective motion at small to medium group sizes ($\sim$10-1000…
We study noisy majority-rule dynamics on annealed hypergraphs to clarify how variability in group interaction sizes reshapes collective ordering. At each update, a group is sampled from a prescribed size distribution and either follows the…
Critical transitions in multistable systems have been discussed as models for a variety of phenomena ranging from the extinctions of species to socio-economic changes and climate transitions between ice-ages and warm-ages. From bifurcation…
We study the collective behaviour of an ensemble of coupled motile elements whose interactions depend on time and are alternatively attractive or repulsive. The evolution of interactions is driven by individual internal variables with…
"Wisdom of crowds" refers to the phenomenon that the average opinion of a group of individuals on a given question can be very close to the true answer. It requires a large group diversity of opinions, but the collective error, the…
Complex adaptive systems have been the subject of much recent attention. It is by now well-established that members (`agents') tend to self-segregate into opposing groups characterized by extreme behavior. However, while different social…
We analyse numerically the effects of small population size in the initial transient regime of a simple example population dynamics. These effects play an important role for the numerical determination of large deviation functions of…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Cluster number is typically a parameter selected at the outset in clustering problems, and while impactful, the choice can often be difficult to justify. Inspired by bioinformatics, this study examines how the nature of clusters varies with…
We study an ecology-inspired model for a population of bounded size, whose dynamics is governed by random birth, death, and immigration events. Stochastic fluctuations in the number of individuals give rise to a succession of alternating…
Does talking to others make people more accurate or less accurate on numeric estimates such as quantitative evaluations or probabilistic forecasts? Research on peer-to-peer communication suggests that discussion between people will usually…
At the point of a second order phase transition also termed as a critical point, systems display long range order and their macroscopic behaviors are independent of the microscopic details making up the system. Due to these properties, it…
How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the answers…
Motivated by modeling the dynamics of a population living in a flowing medium where the environmental factors are random in space, we have studied an asymmetric variant of the one-dimensional contact process, where the quenched random…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…