相关论文: Too Soon for Doom Gloom?
The "majority dynamics" process on a social network begins with an initial phase, where the individuals are split into two competing parties, Red and Blue. Every day, everyone updates their affiliation to match the majority among those of…
Quantities with right-skewed distributions are ubiquitous in complex social systems, including political conflict, economics and social networks, and these systems sometimes produce extremely large events. For instance, the 9/11 terrorist…
The naming game has become an archetype for linguistic evolution and mathematical social behavioral analysis. In the model presented here, there are $N$ individuals and $K$ words. Our contribution is developing a robust method that handles…
Using a temporal version of the Copernican principle, Gott has proposed a statistical predictor of future longevity based on present age [J. R. Gott III, Nature 363, 315 (1993)] and applied the predictor to a variety of examples, including…
Why are life trajectories difficult to predict? We investigated this question through in-depth qualitative interviews with 40 families sampled from a multi-decade longitudinal study. Our sampling and interviewing process were informed by…
The goal of the article is to explore what is the most probable type of simulation in which humanity lives (if any) and how this affects simulation termination risks. We firstly explore the question of what kind of simulation in which…
We consider a crowd of N persons trying to exit some area trough a small exit. The probability is calculated that an individual is able to withdraw from the crowd under one's own steam. The problem is simulated within the generalized force…
Toby Walsh in 'The Singularity May Never Be Near' gives six arguments to support his point of view that technological singularity may happen but that it is unlikely. In this paper, we provide analysis of each one of his arguments and arrive…
In this article, we attempt to convince the reader that the origin of life was such an exceptionally unlikely event that it probably has never occurred elsewhere. This involves an explicit calculation using the laws of physics which, while…
A central issue in ecology today is that of the factors determining the relative abundance of species within a natural community. The proper application of the principles of statistical physics to the problem of species abundance…
All priors are not created equal. There are right and there are wrong priors. That is the main conclusion of this contribution. I use, a cooked-up example designed to create drama, and a typical textbook example to show the pervasiveness of…
Humanity's path to avoiding extinction is a daunting and inevitable challenge which proves difficult to solve, partially due to the lack of data and evidence surrounding the concept. We aim to address this confusion by addressing the most…
Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence…
Collecting genomics data across multiple heterogeneous populations (e.g., across different cancer types) has the potential to improve our understanding of disease. Despite sequencing advances, though, resources often remain a constraint…
The share of the world population living in cities with more than one million people rose from 11% in 1975 to 24% in 2025 (our estimates). Will this trend towards greater concentration in large cities continue or level off? We introduce two…
Numerous Earth-destroying doomsday scenarios have recently been analyzed, including breakdown of a metastable vacuum state and planetary destruction triggered by a "strangelet'' or microscopic black hole. We point out that many previous…
Given a (possibly infinite) subset $A$ of the natural numbers, we ask how many times a fair six-sided die must be rolled until the rolled numbers add up to an element of $A$. Using a one-dimensional dynamic programming recursion together…
We consider a branching random walk in a random space-time environment of disasters where each particle is killed when meeting a disaster. This extends the model of the "random walk in a disastrous random environment" introduced by [15]. We…
Astronomy is an observationally-led subject where chance discoveries play an important role. A whole range of such discoveries is continually made, from the trivial to the highly significant. What is generally needed is for luck to strike…
Developing new ways to estimate probabilities can be valuable for science, statistics, and engineering. By considering the information content of different output patterns, recent work invoking algorithmic information theory has shown that…