Related papers: Highly Optimized Tolerance: Robustness and Power L…

Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…

Thermodynamic selection is an indirect competition between agents feeding on the same energy resource and obeying the laws of thermodynamics. We examine scenarios of this selection, where the agent is modeled as a heat-engine coupled to two…

Previously derived "global" thermodynamic speed limit theorems state that increasing the maximum speed with which a system can evolve between two given probability distributions over its states requires the system to produce more entropy in…

The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into…

Adaptive transport networks in biological and physical systems exhibit hierarchical organization, characteristic channel spacing, and robust scaling relations. Existing adaptive network models, formulated on a lattice, successfully…

Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological systems naturally exhibit robustness, there is no…

A key strategy in societal adaptation to climate change is using alert systems to prompt preventative action and reduce the adverse health impacts of extreme heat events. This paper implements and evaluates reinforcement learning (RL) as a…

Power systems are globally experiencing an unprecedented growth in size and complexity due to the advent of nonconventional generation and consumption technologies. To navigate computational complexity, power system dynamic models are often…

Naturally occuring or man-made systems displaying periodic spatial modulations of their properties on a nanoscale constitute superlattices. Such modulated structures are important both as prototypes of simple nanotechnological devices and…

Noise is a ubiquitous feature of the physical world. As a result, the first prerequisite of life is fault tolerance: maintaining integrity of state despite external bombardment. Recent experimental advances have revealed that biological…

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…

We review recent theoretical developments, which suggest that a set of shared principles underpin macroscopic quantum phenomena observed in high temperature super conducting materials, room temperature coherence in photosynthetic processes…

When a biological system robustly corrects component-level errors, the direct pressure on component performance declines. Components may become less reliable, maintain more genetic variability, or drift neutrally in design, creating the…

The interaction between natural selection and random mutation is frequently debated in recent years. Does similar dilemma also exist in the evolution of real networks such as biological networks? In this paper, we try to discuss this issue…

We introduce the idea of weakly coherent collisional models, where the elements of an environment interacting with a system of interest are prepared in states that are approximately thermal, but have an amount of coherence proportional to a…

Criticality has been proposed as a mechanism for the emergence of complexity, life, and computation, as it exhibits a balance between robustness and adaptability. In classic models of complex systems where structure and dynamics are…

Living organisms, ecosystems, and social systems are examples of complex systems in which robustness against inclusion of new elements is an essential feature. A recently proposed simple model has revealed a general mechanism by which such…

Control systems should enforce a desired property for both expected modeled situations as well as unexpected unmodeled environmental situations. Existing methods focus on designing controllers to enforce the desired property only when the…

Linear response theory has found many applications in statistical physics. One of these is to compute minimal-work protocols that drive nonequilibrium systems between different thermodynamic states, which are useful for designing engineered…

This Letter brings together two topics that, until now, have been the focus of intense but non-overlapping research efforts. The first concerns high harmonic generation in solids, which occurs when intense light field excites highly…