Related papers: Emergent Macro-Criticality from Micro-Critical Age…

In complex systems, external parameters often determine the phase in which the system operates, i.e., its macroscopic behavior. For nearly a century, statistical physics has extensively studied systems' transitions across phases,…

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…

The observation of apparent power-laws in neuronal systems has led to the suggestion that the brain is at, or close to, a critical state and may be a self-organised critical system. Within the framework of self-organised criticality a…

This paper studies a stylized model of local interaction where agents choose from an ever increasing set of vertically ranked actions, e.g. technologies. The driving forces of the model are infrequent upward shifts (``updates''), followed…

This Thesis explores how tools from Statistical Physics and Information Theory can help us describe and understand complex systems. In the first part, we study the interplay between internal interactions, environmental changes, and…

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…

Many biological and cognitive systems do not operate deep within one or other regime of activity. Instead, they are poised at critical points located at phase transitions in their parameter space. The pervasiveness of criticality suggests…

It has long been hypothesized that operating close to the critical state is beneficial for natural and artificial systems. We test this hypothesis by evolving foraging agents controlled by neural networks that can change the system's…

The hypothesis that living systems can benefit from operating at the vicinity of critical points has gained momentum in recent years. Criticality may confer an optimal balance between exceedingly ordered and too noisy states. We here…

A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…

Dynamical criticality has been shown to enhance information processing in dynamical systems, and there is evidence for self-organized criticality in neural networks. A plausible mechanism for such self-organization is activity dependent…

According to the criticality hypothesis, collective biological systems should operate in a special parameter region, close to so-called critical points, where the collective behavior undergoes a qualitative change between different…

We derive a class of macroscopic differential equations that describe collective adaptation, starting from a discrete-time stochastic microscopic model. The behavior of each agent is a dynamic balance between adaptation that locally…

The dynamics of competing opinions in social network play an important role in society, with many applications in diverse social contexts as consensus, elections, morality and so on. Here we study a model of interacting agents connected in…

In this paper, we derive a kinetic description of swarming particle dynamics in an interacting multi-agent system featuring emerging leaders and followers. Agents are classically characterized by their position and velocity plus a…

Multiple studies of neural avalanches across different data modalities led to the prominent hypothesis that the brain operates near a critical point. The observed exponents often indicate the mean-field directed-percolation universality…

Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such scale-free patterns were identified experimentally in many…

Social movements, neurons in the brain or even industrial suppliers are best described by agents evolving on networks with basic interaction rules. In these real systems, the connectivity between agents corresponds to the a critical state…

Living systems operate in a critical dynamical regime -- between order and chaos -- where they are both resilient to perturbation, and flexible enough to evolve. To characterize such critical dynamics, the established 'structural theory' of…

It has long been hypothesized that operating close to the critical state is beneficial for natural, artificial and their evolutionary systems. We put this hypothesis to test in a system of evolving foraging agents controlled by neural…