Related papers: Open at the Top; Open at the Bottom; and Continual…
Complex systems are characterized by specific time-dependent interactions among their many constituents. As a consequence they often manifest rich, non-trivial and unexpected behavior. Examples arise both in the physical and non-physical…
Over the past six decades, the computing systems field has experienced significant transformations, profoundly impacting society with transformational developments, such as the Internet and the commodification of computing. Underpinned by…
Our entire society is becoming more and more dependent on technology and specifically on software. The integration of e-learning software systems into our day by day life especially in e-learning applications generates modifications upon…
Anyone in need of a data system today is confronted with numerous complex options in terms of system architectures, such as traditional relational databases, NoSQL and NewSQL solutions as well as several sub-categories like column-stores,…
Top-down causation has been suggested to occur at all scales of biological organization as a mechanism for explaining the hierarchy of structure and causation in living systems. Here we propose that a transition from bottom-up to top-down…
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…
Nature can be seen as informational structure with computational dynamics (info-computationalism), where an (info-computational) agent is needed for the potential information of the world to actualize. Starting from the definition of…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
Emergent behavior that appears at a given level of organization may be characterized as arising from an organizationally lower level in such a way that it transcends a mere increase in the behavioral degree of complexity. It is therefore to…
As Physics did in previous centuries, there is currently a common dream of extracting generic laws of nature in economics, sociology, neuroscience, by focalising the description of phenomena to a minimal set of variables and parameters,…
The co-evolution of structure and dynamics, known as adaptivity, is a fundamental property in various systems and drives diverse emergent behaviors. However, the adaptivity in previous works is primarily stemmed from pairwise situations,…
Open-ended evolutionary dynamics remains an elusive goal for artificial evolutionary systems. Many ideas exist in the biological literature beyond the basic Darwinian requirements of variation, differential reproduction and inheritance. I…
Research software refers to software development tools that accelerate discovery and simplifies access to digital infrastructures. However, although research software platforms can be built increasingly more innovative and powerful than…
Many complex systems are representable as macroscopic set of elements which interact by simple rules. The complex macroscopically relevant phenomena are then the result of the generic emergence of a space-time multi-scale dynamics. Critical…
Software evolution is a fundamental process that transcends the realm of technical artifacts and permeates the entire organizational structure of a software project. By means of a longitudinal empirical study of 18 large open-source…
The interplay between dissipation and correlation can lead to novel emergent phenomena in open systems. Here we investigate ``steady-state topological order'' defined by the robust topological degeneracy of steady states, which is a…
Generic open quantum dynamics can be described by two seemingly very distinct approaches: a top down approach by considering an (unknown) environment coupled to the system and affects the observed dynamics of the system; or a bottom up…
We consider the problem of the evolution of a code within a structured population of agents. The agents try to maximise their information about their environment by acquiring information from the outputs of other agents in the population. A…
Persistence is an important characteristic of many complex systems in nature, related to how long the system remains at a certain state before changing to a different one. The study of complex systems' persistence involves different…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…