Curated by Complexity Digest
Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology
One of the most universal trends in science and technology today is the growth of large teams in all areas, as solitary researchers and small teams diminish in prevalence1,2,3. Increases in team size have been attributed to the specialization of scientific activities3, improvements in communicati...
A collaborative multiyear, multimodel assessment of seasonal influenza forecasting in the United ...
Accurate prediction of the size and timing of infectious disease outbreaks could help public health officials in planning an appropriate response. This paper compares approaches developed by five different research groups to forecast seasonal influenza outbreaks in real time in the United States....
Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election
The spread of fake news on social media became a public concern in the United States after the 2016 presidential election. We examined exposure to and sharing of fake news by registered voters on Twitter and found that engagement with fake news sources was extremely concentrated. Only 1% of indiv...
The Multilayer Structure of Corporate Networks
Various company interactions can be described by networks, for instance the ownership networks and the board membership networks. To understand the ecosystem of companies, these interactions cannot be seen in isolation. For this purpose we construct a new multilayer network of interactions betwee...
Continuous versus Discontinuous Transitions in the $D$-Dimensional Generalized Kuramoto Model: Od...
The Kuramoto model, originally proposed to model the dynamics of many interacting oscillators, has been used and generalized for a wide range of applications involving the collective behavior of large heterogeneous groups of dynamical units whose states are characterized by a scalar angle variabl...
Detecting sequences of system states in temporal networks
Many time-evolving systems in nature, society and technology leave traces of the interactions within them. These interactions form temporal networks that reflect the states of the systems. In this work, we pursue a coarse-grained description of these systems by proposing a method to assign discre...
Percolation and the Effective Structure of Complex Networks
Analytical approaches to model the structure of complex networks can be distinguished into two groups according to whether they consider an intensive (e.g., fixed degree sequence and random otherwise) or an extensive (e.g., adjacency matrix) description of the network structure. While extensive a...
Opinion Mining From Social Media Short Texts: Does Collective Intelligence Beat Deep Learning?
The era of big data has, among others, three characteristics: the huge amounts of data created every day and in every form by everyday people, artificial intelligence tools to mine information from those data and effective algorithms that allow this data mining in real or close to real time. On t...
Urban sensing as a random search process
We study a new random search process: the \textit{taxi-drive}. The motivation for this process comes from urban sensing, in which sensors are mounted on moving vehicles such as taxis, allowing urban environments to be opportunistically monitored. Inspired by the movements of real taxis, the taxi-...
Ensembles, Dynamics, and Cell Types: Revisiting the Statistical Mechanics Perspective on Cellular...
•50 years Boolean networks as models for gene regulatory networks
•Random Boolean networks near criticality share properties with genetic networks in cells
•Number of attractors scales as the DNA content raised to the 0.63 power, compares well to current estimate from data (0.88)
•Confirms concep...
Cultural complexity and complexity evolution
We review issues stemming from current models regarding the drivers of cultural complexity and cultural evolution. We disagree with the implication of the treadmill model, based on dual-inheritance theory, that population size is the driver of cultural complexity. The treadmill model reduces the ...
On the frequency and severity of interstate wars
Lewis Fry Richardson argued that the frequency and severity of deadly conflicts of all kinds, from homicides to interstate wars and everything in between, followed universal statistical patterns: their frequency followed a simple Poisson arrival process and their severity followed a simple power-...
Gravity and scaling laws of city to city migration
Models of human migration provide powerful tools to forecast the flow of migrants, measure the impact of a policy, determine the cost of physical and political frictions and more. Here, we analyse the migration of individuals from and to cities in the US, finding that city to city migration follo...
Self-referential basis of undecidable dynamics: From the Liar paradox and the halting problem to ...
In this paper we explore several fundamental relations between formal systems, algorithms, and dynamical systems, focussing on the roles of undecidability, universality, diagonalization, and self-reference in each of these computational frameworks. Some of these interconnections are well-known, w...
Topological control of synchronization patterns: Trading symmetry for stability
Symmetries are ubiquitous in network systems and have profound impacts on the observable dynamics. At the most fundamental level, many synchronization patterns are induced by underlying network symmetry, and a high degree of symmetry is believed to enhance the stability of identical synchronizati...
Opinion Dynamics and Collective Decisions
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are produced by voting procedures which aggregate individual pref...
Taking census of physics
Over the past decades, the diversity of areas explored by physicists has exploded, encompassing new topics from biophysics and chemical physics to network science. However, it is unclear how these new subfields emerged from the traditional subject areas and how physicists explore them. To map out...
Where Does a Shark’s Skin Get Its Pattern?
In 1952, well before developmental biologists spoke in terms of Hoxgenes and transcription factors, or even understood DNA’s structure, Alan Turing had an idea. The famed mathematician who hastened the end of World War II by cracking the Enigma code turned his mind to the natural world and devise...
Pull out all the stops: Textual analysis via punctuation sequences
Whether enjoying the lucid prose of a favorite author or slogging through some other writer's cumbersome, heavy-set prattle (full of parentheses, em-dashes, compound adjectives, and Oxford commas), readers will notice stylistic signatures not only in word choice and grammar, but also in punctuati...
Causal deconvolution by algorithmic generative models
New paper in Nature Machine Intelligence and a video produced by Nature shows how small programs can help deconvolve signals and data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-018-0005-0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkmz7DAA-t8

"Most machine learning approaches extract statistical features...
Morphogenesis in robot swarms
Morphogenesis allows millions of cells to self-organize into intricate structures with a wide variety of functional shapes during embryonic development. This process emerges from local interactions of cells under the control of gene circuits that are identical in every cell, robust to intrinsic n...
Forecasting innovations in science, technology, and education
Human survival depends on our ability to predict future outcomes so that we can make informed decisions. Human cognition and perception are optimized for local, short-term decision-making, such as deciding when to fight or flight, whom to mate, or what to eat. For more elaborate decisions (e.g., ...
The role of industry-specific, occupation-specific, and location-specific knowledge in the growth...
How do regions acquire the knowledge they need to diversify their economic activities? How does the migration of workers among firms and industries contribute to the diffusion of that knowledge? Here we measure the industry-, occupation-, and location-specific knowledge carried by workers from on...
The strength of long-range ties in population-scale social networks
Long-range connections that span large social networks are widely assumed to be weak, composed of sporadic and emotionally distant relationships. However, researchers historically have lacked the population-scale network data needed to verify the predicted weakness. Using data from 11 culturally ...
Modeling the Role of the Microbiome in Evolution
There is undeniable evidence showing that bacteria have strongly influenced the evolution and biological functions of multicellular organisms. It has been hypothesized that many host-microbial interactions have emerged so as to increase the adaptive fitness of the holobiont (the host plus its mic...
Cohesion, order and information flow in the collective motion of mixed-species shoals
Despite the frequency with which mixed-species groups are observed in nature, studies of collective behaviour typically focus on single-species groups. Here, we quantify and compare the patterns of interactions between three fish species, threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus), ninespin...
Connecting empirical phenomena and theoretical models of biological coordination across scales
Coordination is ubiquitous in living systems. Existing theoretical models of coordination -- from bacteria to brains -- focus on either gross statistics in large-scale systems (N→∞) or detailed dynamics in small-scale systems (mostly N=2). Both approaches have proceeded largely independent of eac...
Antifragility of Random Boolean Networks
Antifragility is a property that enhances the capability of a system in response to external perturbations. Although the concept has been applied in many areas, a practical measure of antifragility has not been developed yet. Here we propose a simply calculable measure of antifragility, based on ...
The universal decay of collective memory and attention
Collective memory and attention are sustained by two channels: oral communication (communicative memory) and the physical recording of information (cultural memory). Here, we use data on the citation of academic articles and patents, and on the online attention received by songs, movies and biogr...
The chaperone effect in scientific publishing
Experience plays a critical role in crafting high-impact scientific work. This is particularly evident in top multidisciplinary journals, where a scientist is unlikely to appear as senior author if he or she has not previously published within the same journal. Here, we develop a quantitative und...
Macroscopic dynamics and the collapse of urban traffic
Stories of mega-jams that last tens of hours or even days appear not only in fiction but also in reality. In this context, it is important to characterize the collapse of the network, defined as the transition from a characteristic travel time to orders of magnitude longer for the same distance t...
ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worst
Our goal is to train a policy for autonomous driving via imitation learning that is robust enough to drive a real vehicle. We find that standard behavior cloning is insufficient for handling complex driving scenarios, even when we leverage a perception system for preprocessing the input and a con...
Modeling Memory Effects in Activity-Driven Networks
Activity-driven networks (ADNs) have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm to study the temporal evolution of stochastic networked systems. All the information on the time-varying nature of the system is encapsulated into a constant activity parameter, which represents the propensity to generat...
The chaperone effect in scientific publishing
Experience plays a critical role in crafting high-impact scientific work. This is particularly evident in top multidisciplinary journals, where a scientist is unlikely to appear as senior author if he or she has not previously published within the same journal. Here, we develop a quantitative und...
The Inherent Instability of Disordered Systems
The Multiscale Law of Requisite Variety is a scientific law relating, at each scale, the variation in an environment to the variation in internal state that is necessary for effective response by a system. While this law has been used to describe the effectiveness of systems in self-regulation, t...
Stability of democracies: a complex systems perspective
The idea that democracy is under threat, after being largely dormant for at least 40 years, is looming increasingly large in public discourse. Complex systems theory offers a range of powerful new tools to analyse the stability of social institutions in general, and democracy in particular. What ...
Consciousness: The last 50 years (and the next)
The mind and brain sciences began with consciousness as a central concern. But for much of the 20th century, ideological and methodological concerns relegated its empirical study to the margins. Since the 1990s, studying consciousness has regained a legitimacy and momentum befitting its status as...
Beyond Calories: A Holistic Assessment of the Global Food System
The global food system is failing to meet nutritional needs, with growing concerns for health related to both under-, over-consumption and severe micronutrient deficiency. The 2nd Sustainable Development Goal (SDG2) targets the end of malnutrition in all forms by 2030. To address this challenge, ...
A structural transition in physical networks
In many physical networks, including neurons in the brain1,2, three-dimensional integrated circuits3 and underground hyphal networks4, the nodes and links are physical objects that cannot intersect or overlap with each other. To take this into account, non-crossing conditions can be imposed to co...
The Impact of Potential Crowd Behaviours on Emergency Evacuation
Crowd dynamics have important applications in evacuation management systems relevant to organizing safer large scale gatherings. For crowd safety, it is very important to study the evolution of potential crowd behaviours by simulating the crowd evacuation process. Planning crowd control tasks via...
AI for the Common Good?! Pitfalls, challenges, and Ethics Pen-Testing
Recently, many AI researchers and practitioners have embarked on research visions that involve doing AI for "Good". This is part of a general drive towards infusing AI research and practice with ethical thinking. One frequent theme in current ethical guidelines is the requirement that AI be good ...
Quantifying the sensing power of crowd-sourced vehicle fleets
Sensors can measure air quality, traffic congestion, and other aspects of urban environments. The fine-grained diagnostic information they provide could help urban managers to monitor a city's health. Recently, a `drive-by' paradigm has been proposed in which sensors are deployed on third-party v...
Statistical physics of liquid brains
Liquid neural networks (or ''liquid brains'') are a widespread class of cognitive living networks characterised by a common feature: the agents (ants or immune cells, for example) move in space. Thus, no fixed, long-term agent-agent connections are maintained, in contrast with standard neural sys...
The Crisis of Reproducibility, the Denominator Problem and the Scientific Role of Multi-scale Mod...
The “Crisis of Reproducibility” has received considerable attention both within the scientific community and without. While factors associated with scientific culture and practical practice are most often invoked, I propose that the Crisis of Reproducibility is ultimately a failure of generalizat...
Optimal Sequence Memory in Driven Random Networks
Autonomous, randomly coupled, neural networks display a transition to chaos at a critical coupling strength. Here, we investigate the effect of a time-varying input on the onset of chaos and the resulting consequences for information processing. Dynamic mean-field theory yields the statistics of ...
Quantifying Biases in Online Information Exposure
Our consumption of online information is mediated by filtering, ranking, and recommendation algorithms that introduce unintentional biases as they attempt to deliver relevant and engaging content. It has been suggested that our reliance on online technologies such as search engines and social med...
Multiscale impact of researcher mobility
International mobility facilitates the exchange of scientific, institutional and cultural knowledge. Yet whether globalization and advances in virtual communication technologies have altered the impact of researcher mobility is a relevant and open question that we address by analysing a broad int...
Rank-frequency distribution of natural languages: a difference of probabilities approach
The time variation of the rank k of words for six Indo-European languages is obtained using data from Google Books. For low ranks the distinct languages behave differently, maybe due to syntaxis rules, whereas for k>50 the law of large numbers predominates. The dynamics of k is described stochast...
Measurability of the epidemic reproduction number in data-driven contact networks
The analysis of real epidemiological data has raised issues of the adequacy of the classic homogeneous modeling framework and quantities, such as the basic reproduction number in real-world situations. Based on high-quality sociodemographic data, here we generate a multiplex network describing th...
Bio-inspired computing: Algorithms review, deep analysis, and the scope of applications
Bio-inspired computing represents the umbrella of different studies of computer science, mathematics, and biology in the last years. Bio-inspired computing optimization algorithms is an emerging approach which is based on the principles and inspiration of the biological evolution of nature to dev...
Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning
As someone who has worked in A.I. for decades, I’ve witnessed the failure of similar predictions of imminent human-level A.I., and I’m certain these latest forecasts will fall short as well. The challenge of creating humanlike intelligence in machines remains greatly underestimated. Today’s A.I. ...
Credit Is About Perception More Than Performance
I first learned about Douglas Prasher three years ago, when an algorithm we’d just developed made an unpredictable prediction: He should have been a recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize.Instead, the award had been given to three other scientists. Even more surprising was our inability to find Prashe...
Spreading in scale-free computer networks with improved clustering
In this study, we investigated data spreading in computer networks with scale-free topology under various levels of improved clustering. Starting from a pure Barabási–Albert (BA) network topology, we applied a Poisson-based rewiring procedure with increasing rewiring probability, which promotes l...
Functional structures of US state governments
Understanding of modern government is limited by a lack of comprehensive, reliable, comparable data on what governments do and how they are organized to execute their diverse responsibilities. We demonstrate that such data can be collected from the extensive footprint that governments leave on th...
What is the state of complexity science in medical education research?
‘Complexity’ is fast becoming a ‘god term’ in medical education, but little is known about how scholars in the field apply complexity science to the exploration of education phenomena. Complexity science presents both opportunities and challenges to those wishing to adopt its approaches in their ...
Distributed Estimation of State and Parameters in Multi-Agent Cooperative Manipulation
We present two distributed methods for the estimation of the kinematic parameters, the dynamic parameters, and the kinematic state of an unknown planar body manipulated by a decentralized multi-agent system. The proposed approaches rely on the rigid body kinematics and dynamics, on nonlinear obse...
The spread of low-credibility content by social bots
Online misinformation is a threat to a well-informed electorate and undermines democracy. Here, the authors analyse the spread of articles on Twitter, find that bots play a major role in the spread of low-credibility content and suggest control measures for limiting the spread of misinformation.
...
Fractional Dynamics of Individuals in Complex Networks
The relation between the behavior of a single element and the global dynamics of its host network is an open problem in the science of complex networks. We demonstrate that for a dynamic network that belongs to the Ising universality class, this problem can be approached analytically through a su...
Information Dynamics in Urban Crime
Information production in both space and time has been highlighted as one of the elements that shapes the footprint of complexity in natural and socio-technical systems. However, information production in urban crime has barely been studied. This work copes with this problem by using multifractal...
Cities, from Information to Interaction
From physics to the social sciences, information is now seen as a fundamental component of reality. However, a form of information seems still underestimated, perhaps precisely because it is so pervasive that we take it for granted: the information encoded in the very environment we live in. We s...
Power and Leadership: A Complex Systems Science Approach Part I—Representation and Dynamics
Historical social narratives are dominated by the actions of powerful individuals as well as competitions for power including warfare, revolutions, and political change. Advancing our understanding of the origins, types and competitive strength of different kinds of power may yield a scaffolding ...
The Moral Machine experiment
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence have come concerns about how machines will make moral decisions, and the major challenge of quantifying societal expectations about the ethical principles that should guide machine behaviour. To address this challenge, we deployed the Moral Ma...
Self-driving car dilemmas reveal that moral choices are not universal
When a driver slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a pedestrian crossing the road illegally, she is making a moral decision that shifts risk from the pedestrian to the people in the car. Self-driving cars might soon have to make such ethical judgments on their own — but settling on a universal mo...
A Nobel opportunity for interdisciplinarity
Despite the growing interdisciplinarity of research, the Nobel Prize consolidates the traditional disciplinary categorization of science. There is, in fact, an opportunity for the most revered scientific reward to mirror the current research landscape.

A Nobel opportunity for interdisciplinarit...
Urban Swarms: A new approach for autonomous waste management
Modern cities are growing ecosystems that face new challenges due to the increasing population demands. One of the many problems they face nowadays is waste management, which has become a pressing issue requiring new solutions. Swarm robotics systems have been attracting an increasing amount of a...
Quantifying reputation and success in art
In areas of human activity where performance is difficult to quantify in an objective fashion, reputation and networks of influence play a key role in determining access to resources and rewards. To understand the role of these factors, we reconstructed the exhibition history of half a million ar...
How algorithmic popularity bias hinders or promotes quality
Algorithms that favor popular items are used to help us select among many choices, from top-ranked search engine results to highly-cited scientific papers. The goal of these algorithms is to identify high-quality items such as reliable news, credible information sources, and important discoveries...
Scale-free Networks Well Done
We bring rigor to the vibrant activity of detecting power laws in empirical degree distributions in real-world networks. We first provide a rigorous definition of power-law distributions, equivalent to the definition of regularly varying distributions in statistics. This definition allows the dis...
Anticipating Cryptocurrency Prices Using Machine Learning
Machine learning and AI-assisted trading have attracted growing interest for the past few years. Here, we use this approach to test the hypothesis that the inefficiency of the cryptocurrency market can be exploited to generate abnormal profits. We analyse daily data for 1,681 cryptocurrencies for...
Communication in Online Social Networks Fosters Cultural Isolation
Online social networks play an increasingly important role in communication between friends, colleagues, business partners, and family members. This development sparked public and scholarly debate about how these new platforms affect dynamics of cultural diversity. Formal models of cultural disse...
Negative Representation and Instability in Democratic Elections
Semantic information, agency, & physics
Shannon information theory provides various measures of so-called syntactic information, which reflect the amount of statistical correlation between systems. By contrast, the concept of ‘semantic information’ refers to those correlations which carry significance or ‘meaning’ for a given system. S...
An Information-Theoretic Approach to Self-Organisation: Emergence of Complex Interdependencies in...
Self-organisation lies at the core of fundamental but still unresolved scientific questions, and holds the promise of de-centralised paradigms crucial for future technological developments. While self-organising processes have been traditionally explained by the tendency of dynamical systems to e...
Thermodynamics of urban transformations
Urban transformations within large and growing metropolitan areas often generate critical dynamics affecting social interactions, transport connectivity and income flow distribution. We develop a statistical–mechanical model of urban transformations, exemplified for Greater Sydney, and derive a t...
From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities
Community detection is often used to understand the structure of large and complex networks. One of the most popular algorithms for uncovering community structure is the so-called Louvain algorithm. We show that this algorithm has a major defect that largely went unnoticed until now: the Louvain ...
Connectivity and complex systems: learning from a multi-disciplinary perspective
In recent years, parallel developments in disparate disciplines have focused on what has come to be termed connectivity; a concept used in understanding and describing complex systems. Conceptualisations and operationalisations of connectivity have evolved largely within their disciplinary bounda...
The Standard Genetic Code can Evolve from a Two-Letter GC Code Without Information Loss or Costly...
It is widely agreed that the standard genetic code must have been preceded by a simpler code that encoded fewer amino acids. How this simpler code could have expanded into the standard genetic code is not well understood because most changes to the code are costly. Taking inspiration from the rec...
Supplemented Alkaline Phosphatase Supports the Immune Response in Patients Undergoing Cardiac Sur...
Alkaline phosphatase (AP) is an enzyme that exhibits anti-inflammatory effects by dephosphorylating inflammation triggering moieties (ITMs) like bacterial lipopolysaccharides and extracellular nucleotides. AP administration aims to prevent and treat peri- and post-surgical ischemia reperfusion in...
Learning from Mixed Signals in Online Innovation Communities
We study how contributors to innovation contests improve their performance through direct experience and by observing others as they synthesize learnable signals from different sources. Our research draws on a 10-year panel of more than 55,000 individuals participating in a firm-hosted online inn...
The Resilience of Public Policies in Economic Development
This paper studies the resilience of public policies that governments design for catalyzing economic development. This property depends on the extent to which behavioral heuristics and spillover effects allow policymakers to attain their original goals when a particular policy cannot be funded as...
Entraining chaotic dynamics: A novel movement sonification paradigm could promote generalization
Tasks encountered in daily living may have instabilities and more dimensions than are sampled by the senses such as when carrying a cup of coffee and only the surface motion and overall momentum are sensed, not the fluid dynamics. Anticipating non-periodic dynamics is difficult but not impossible...
Smeared phase transitions in percolation on real complex networks
Percolation on complex networks is used both as a model for dynamics on networks, such as network robustness or epidemic spreading, and as a benchmark for our models of networks, where our ability to predict percolation measures our ability to describe the networks themselves. In many application...
Dynamical Criticality in Gene Regulatory Networks
A well-known hypothesis, with far-reaching implications, is that biological evolution should preferentially lead to states that are dynamically critical. In previous papers, we showed that a well-known model of genetic regulatory networks, namely, that of random Boolean networks, allows one to st...
Social style and resilience of macaques’ networks, a theoretical investigation
Group-living animals rely on efficient transmission of information for optimal exploitation of their habitat. How efficient and resilient a network is depend on its structure, which is a consequence of the social interactions of the individuals that comprise the network. In macaques, network stru...
Cross-boundary Behavioural Reprogrammability Reveals Evidence of Pervasive Turing-Universality
New paper sheds light on the pervasiveness of Turing universality by showing a series of behavioural boundary crossing results, including emulations (for all initial conditions) of Wolfram class 2 Elementary Cellular Automata (ECA) by Class 1 ECA, emulations of Classes 1, 2 and 3 ECA by Class 2 a...
The Adaptive Behavior of a Soccer Team: An Entropy-Based Analysis
To optimize its performance, a competitive team, such as a soccer team, must maintain a delicate balance between organization and disorganization. On the one hand, the team should maintain organized patterns of behavior to maximize the cooperation between its members. On the other hand, the team’...
Modeling Collective Rule at Ancient Teotihuacan as a Complex Adaptive System: Communal Ritual Mak...
Experts remain divided about the nature of the sociopolitical system of ancient Teotihuacan, which was one of the earliest and largest urban civilizations of the Americas. Excavations hoping to find compelling evidence of powerful rulers, such as a royal tomb, keep coming away empty-handed. But t...
Large-scale investigation of the reasons why potentially important genes are ignored
Biomedical research is one of the largest areas of present-day science and embeds the hope and potential to improve the lives of the general public. In order to understand how individual scientists choose individual research questions, we study why certain genes are well studied but others are no...
What an Entangled Web We Weave: An Information-centric Approach to Time-evolving Socio-technical ...
A new layer of complexity, constituted of networks of information token recurrence, has been identified in socio-technical systems such as the Wikipedia online community and the Zooniverse citizen science platform. The identification of this complexity reveals that our current understanding of th...
Decentralized Collective Learning for Self-managed Sharing Economies
The Internet of Things equips citizens with phenomenal new means for online participation in sharing economies. When agents self-determine options from which they choose, for instance their resource consump- tion and production, while these choices have a collective system-wide impact, optimal de...
Good Things for Those Who Wait: Predictive Modeling Highlights Importance of Delay Discounting fo...
Income is a primary determinant of social mobility, career progression, and personal happiness. It has been shown to vary with demographic variables like age and education, with more oblique variables such as height, and with behaviors such as delay discounting, i.e., the propensity to devalue fu...
Rule Primality, Minimal Generating Sets and Turing-Universality in the Causal Decomposition of El...
New Turing-universality results in Elementary Cellular Automata in recent published paper: "Rule Primality, Minimal Generating Sets and Turing-Universality in the Causal Decomposition of Elementary Cellular Automata" by Jürgen Riedel and Hector Zenil

New paper discovers and proves new universal...
The Silent Cooperator: An Epigenetic Model for Emergence of Altruistic Traits in Biological Systems
Spatial evolutionary game theory explains how cooperative traits can survive the intense competition in biological systems. If the spatial distribution allows cooperators to interact with each other frequently, the benefits of cooperation will outweigh the losses due to exploitation by selfish or...
Cognitive mechanisms for human flocking dynamics
Low-level “adaptive” and higher-level “sophisticated” human reasoning processes have been proposed to play opposing roles in the emergence of unpredictable collective behaviors such as crowd panics, traffic jams, and market bubbles. While adaptive processes are widely recognized drivers of emerge...
Zipf's and Taylor's laws
Zipf's law states that the frequency of an observation with a given value is inversely proportional to the square of that value; Taylor's law, instead, describes the scaling between fluctuations in the size of a population and its mean. Empirical evidence of the validity of these laws has been fo...
Measuring accessibility using gravity and radiation models
Since the presentation of the radiation model, much work has been done to compare its findings with those obtained from gravitational models. These comparisons always aim at measuring the accuracy with which the models reproduce the mobility described by origin–destination matrices. This has been...
Criticality distinguishes the ensemble of biological regulatory networks
The hypothesis many living systems should exhibit near-critical behavior is well-motivated theoretically, and an increasing number of cases have been demonstrated empirically. However, a systematic analysis across biological networks, which would enable identification of the network properties th...
Physical foundations of biological complexity
Living organisms are characterized by a degree of hierarchical complexity that appears to be inaccessible to even the most complex inanimate objects. Routes and patterns of the evolution of complexity are poorly understood. We propose a general conceptual framework for emergence of complexity thr...
Gaia 2.0
According to Lovelock and Margulis's Gaia hypothesis, living things are part of a planetary-scale self-regulating system that has maintained habitable conditions for the past 3.5 billion years (1, 2). Gaia has operated without foresight or planning on the part of organisms, but the evolution of h...
Closed Loophole Confirms the Unreality of the Quantum World
After researchers found a loophole in a famous experiment designed to prove that quantum objects don’t have intrinsic properties, three experimental groups quickly sewed the loophole shut. The episode closes the door on many “hidden variable” theories.