Related papers: Complex worlds from simple rules?
While modern physics and biology satisfactorily explain the passage from the Big Bang to the formation of Earth and the first cells to present-day life, respectively, the origins of biochemical life still remain an open question. Since…
Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…
The ball lightning phenomenon is explained in the frame of a self-organization scenario suggested by experiments performed on the spontaneously generated complex spherical space charge configuration in plasma. Originated in a hot plasma,…
The rising complexity of our terrestrial surrounding is an empirical fact. Details of this process evaded description in terms of physics for long time attracting attention and creating myriad of ideas including non-scientific ones. In this…
The origin of macroscopic complexity is traced in a wide range of systems (imunology, ecology, finance, marketing, etc) to the discrete and auto-catalytic (i.e. multiplicative) character of their elementary components. Even in the simplest…
Complex spatiotemporal patterns in nature significantly challenge reductionism-based modern science. The lack of a paradigm beyond reductionism hinders our understanding of the emergence of complexity. The diversity of countless patterns…
The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…
We discuss the anthropic principle and its implications for our existence and the physical laws which govern the universe. Several amazing coincidences which provide conditions necessary for creation of life suggest that the "laws of…
We will focus on the Quantum theory and starting from simple philosophical conjectures, we infer possible different physical realities. Also we argue of possible wavefunction emerging under specific conditions of the physical reality.…
We propose a method to procedurally generate a familiar yet complex human artifact: the city. We are not trying to reproduce existing cities, but to generate artificial cities that are convincing and plausible by capturing developmental…
A major challenge of interdisciplinary description of complex system behaviour is whether real systems of higher complexity levels can be understood with at least the same degree of objective, "scientific" rigour and universality as…
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…
The physical processes that determine the properties of our everyday world, and of the wider cosmos, are determined by some key numbers: the 'constants' of micro-physics and the parameters that describe the expanding universe in which we…
The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when…
It is argued that selection criteria usually referred to as "anthropic conditions" for the existence of intelligent (typical) observers widely adopted in cosmology amount only to preconditions for primitive life. The existence of life does…
We review possible measures of complexity which might in particular be applicable to situations where the complexity seems to arise spontaneously. We point out that not all of them correspond to the intuitive (or "naive") notion, and that…
Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…
Real-world networks such as the Internet and WWW have many common traits. Until now, hundreds of models were proposed to characterize these traits for understanding the networks. Because different models used very different mechanisms, it…
In this paper we inititate the study of abstract simplicial complexes which are initial segments of qualitative probability orders. This is a natural class that contains the threshold complexes and is contained in the shifted complexes, but…