Related papers: Maximisation Principles and Daisyworld
It is proposed that self-organisation (SO) in non-equilibrium systems is governed by a general principle: it emerges when a minute subset of system configurations are exceptionally stable and long-lived to survive the noise generated by the…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
A formalism based on Pontryagin's maximum principle is applied to determine the time-optimal protocol that drives a general initial state to a target state by a Hamiltonian with limited control, i.e., there is a single control field with…
Unlike many physical nonequilibrium systems, in biological systems, the coupling to external energy sources is not a fixed parameter but adaptively controlled by the system itself. We do not have theoretical frameworks that allow for such…
This paper provides a concise description of the free energy principle, starting from a formulation of random dynamical systems in terms of a Langevin equation and ending with a Bayesian mechanics that can be read as a physics of sentience.…
This study examines a new formulation of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which gives a conditional derivation of the ``maximum entropy production'' (MEP) principle for flow and/or chemical reaction systems at steady state. The analysis uses…
The world is full of systems of distributed agents, collaborating and competing in complex ways: firms and workers specialise within economies, neurons adapt their tuning across brain circuits, and species compete and coexist within…
The selection of an equilibrium state by maximising the entropy of a system, subject to certain constraints, is often powerfully motivated as an exercise in logical inference, a procedure where conclusions are reached on the basis of…
Over the last decade, significant progress has been made in understanding complex biological systems, however there have been few attempts at incorporating this knowledge into nature inspired optimization algorithms. In this paper, we…
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems, which are considered to be robust, self-organising and scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic problems. So, this work is…
This thesis presents the theoretical, conceptual and methodological aspects that support the modeling of dynamical systems (DS) by using several agents. The modeling approach permits the assessment of properties representing order, change,…
Active matter generates order or patterns through nonequilibrium dynamics. An open research challenge is to determine how efficiently a nonequilibrium self-organising system can convert consumed energy into macroscopic order. We study an…
Self-gravitating Newtonian systems consisting of a very large number of particles have generally defied attempts to describe them using statistical mechanics. This is paradoxical since many astronomical systems, or simulations thereof,…
By driven to extinction species less or poorly adapted, the Darwinian evolutionary theory is intrinsically an optimization theory. We investigate two optimization algorithms with such evolutionary characteristics: the Bak-Sneppen and the…
An important question in the field of AI is the extent to which successful behaviour requires an internal representation of the world. In this work, we quantify the amount of information an optimal policy provides about the underlying…
Inspired by the swarming or flocking of animal systems we study groups of agents moving in unbounded 2D space. Individual trajectories derive from a ``bottom-up'' principle: individuals reorient to maximise their future path entropy over…
We study a class of deterministic mean field games on finite and infinite time horizons arising in models of optimal exploitation of exhaustible resources. The main characteristic of our game is an absorption constraint on the players'…
We discuss the problem of counting the maximum number of distinct states that an isolated physical system can pass through in a given period of time---its maximum speed of dynamical evolution. Previous analyses have given bounds in terms of…
This paper investigates the limit behavior of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) made of independent particles evolving in a common environment, when the number of particles goes to infinity. In the finite horizon case or with a discounted…
In this paper, we study the optimal control of a discrete-time stochastic differential equation (SDE) of mean-field type, where the coefficients can depend on both a function of the law and the state of the process. We establish a new…