These three things—a biological hurricane, computational social science, and the rediscovery of experimentation—are going to change the social sciences in the 21st century. With that change will come, in my judgment, a variety of discoveries and opportunities that offer tremendous prospect for improving the human condition. It's one thing to say that the way in which we study our object of inquiry, namely humans, is undergoing profound change, as I think it is. The social sciences are indeed changing. But the next question is: is the object of inquiry also undergoing profound change? It's not just how we study it that's changing, which it is. The question is: is the thing itself, our humanity, also changing?
How are scientists able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? How does math make the complex cosmos understandable? In this episode, the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and co-host Steven Strogatz explore the deep foundations of the scientific process.
Binghamton Center of Complex Systems (CoCo) Seminar April 3, 2024 Thomas Varley (Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont) "Stability, Integration, and Higher-Order Interactions in Complex Systems"
Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. In these chaotic assemblies, order somehow emerges. Collective behaviors differ in their details from one species to another, but they largely adhere to principles of collective motion that physicists have worked out over centuries. Now, using technologies that only recently became available, researchers have been able to study these patterns of collective animal behavior more closely than ever before. These new insights are unlocking some of the secret fitness advantages of living as part of a group rather than as an individual. The improved understanding of swarming pests such as locusts could also help to protect global food security.
In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz interviews the evolutionary ecologist Iain Couzin about how and why animals exhibit collective behaviors, and the secret advantages that arise from them.
Gli uccelli si affollano. Sciame di locuste. Scuola di pesce. In queste assemblee caotiche, in qualche modo l’ordine emerge. I comportamenti collettivi differiscono nei dettagli da una specie all’altra, ma aderiscono in gran parte ai principi del movimento collettivo che i fisici hanno elaborato nel corso dei secoli. Ora, utilizzando tecnologie rese disponibili solo di recente, i ricercatori sono stati in grado di studiare questi modelli di comportamento animale collettivo più da vicino che mai. Queste nuove intuizioni stanno svelando alcuni dei vantaggi segreti del vivere come parte di un gruppo piuttosto che come individuo. Una migliore comprensione degli sciami di parassiti come le locuste potrebbe anche aiutare a proteggere la sicurezza alimentare globale. In questo episodio, il co-conduttore Steven Strogatz intervista l'ecologista evoluzionista Iain Couzin su come e perché gli animali mostrano comportamenti collettivi e sui vantaggi segreti che ne derivano.
Binghamton Center of Complex Systems (CoCo) Seminar January 24, 2024 Sadamori Kojaku (Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, Binghamton University) "Unsupervised Embedding of Trajectories Captures the Latent Structure of Scientific Migration"
Humans can live up to age 100, and not 1000 – why? Are there limits in how much our brains can think and compute? The laws of physics can help explain a lot, both about our own human bodies and how we are connected to life all around us.
Binghamton Center of Complex Systems (CoCo) Seminar September 27, 2023 Cliff Joslyn (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory / Systems Science and Industrial Engineering,…
Vijay Balasubramanian University of Pennsylvania, SFI The human brain consists of a 100 billion neurons connected by a 100 trillion synapses. In its computational function, each neuron is a simple electrical device. In this sense it is no different, in its conceptual essence, from a transistor or a diode in a silicon microchip, converting input signals into ephemeral voltage pulses that transmit to other neurons. And yet, the collective effect of these tiny electrical flutterings creates the intelligent mind, with its astonishing capacity for perception and action, memory and imagination, affection and indifference. In the words of Ramon y Cajal (1854-1932), a founding figure of neuroscience, neurons are "the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind." In this talk, Vijay Balasubramanian will explore current ideas about how this transmutation occurs.
Il cervello umano è costituito da 100 miliardi di neuroni collegati da una sinapsi di 100 trilioni. Nella sua funzione computazionale, ogni neurone è un semplice dispositivo elettrico. In questo senso non è diverso, nella sua essenza concettuale, da un transistor o un diodo in un microchip al silicio, convertendo i segnali di ingresso in impulsi di tensione effimeri che trasmettono ad altri neuroni. Eppure, l'effetto collettivo di questi piccoli svolazzi elettrici crea la mente intelligente, con la sua sorprendente capacità di percezione e azione, memoria e immaginazione, affetto e indifferenza. Nelle parole di Ramon y Cajal (1854-1932), una figura fondante della neuroscienza, i neuroni sono "le misteriose farfalle dell'anima, il cui battito delle ali potrebbe un giorno rivelarci i segreti della mente."In questo discorso, Vijay Balasubramanian esplorerà le idee attuali su come avviene questa trasmutazione.
Il cervello umano è costituito da 100 miliardi di neuroni collegati da 100 trilioni di sinapsi. Nella sua funzione computazionale, ogni neurone è un semplice dispositivo elettrico. In questo senso non è diverso, nella sua essenza concettuale, da un transistor o un diodo in un microchip di silicio, che converte i segnali di ingresso in impulsi di tensione effimeri che trasmettono ad altri neuroni. Eppure, l'effetto collettivo di questi minuscoli sbalzi elettrici crea la mente intelligente, con la sua sorprendente capacità di percezione e azione, memoria e immaginazione, affetto e indifferenza. Secondo Ramon y Cajal (1854-1932), figura fondatrice delle neuroscienze, i neuroni sono "le misteriose farfalle dell'anima, il cui battito d'ali potrebbe un giorno rivelarci i segreti della mente". In questo discorso, Vijay Balasubramanian esplorerà le idee attuali su come avviene questa trasmutazione.
From the astonishing evolutionary advances of the Cambrian explosion to our present-day computing revolution, the trend of dramatic growth after periods of stability can be explained through the theory of the "adjacent possible," says theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman. Tracing the arc of human history through the tools and technologies we’ve invented, he explains the impact human ingenuity has had on the planet -- and calls for a shift towards more protection for all life on Earth.
Dai sorprendenti progressi evolutivi dell'esplosione cambriana alla nostra attuale rivoluzione informatica, la tendenza della drammatica crescita dopo periodi di stabilità può essere spiegata attraverso la teoria del "adiacente possibile", afferma il biologo teorico Stuart Kauffman. Tracciando l'arco della storia umana attraverso gli strumenti e le tecnologie che abbiamo inventato, spiega l'impatto che l'ingegnosità umana ha avuto sul pianeta e chiede un passaggio verso una maggiore protezione per tutta la vita sulla Terra.
PROPOSITION "AI research and development poses an existential threat."
SUMMARY With the debut of ChatGPT, the AI once promised in some distant future seems to have suddenly arrived with the potential to reshape our working lives, culture, politics and society. For proponents of AI, we are entering a period of unprecedented technological change that will boost productivity, unleash human creativity and empower billions in ways we have only begun to fathom. Others think we should be very concerned about the rapid and unregulated development of machine intelligence. For their detractors, AI applications like ChatGPT herald a brave new world of deep fakes and mass propaganda that could dwarf anything our democracies have experienced to date. Immense economic and political power may also concentrate around the corporations who control these technologies and their treasure troves of data. Finally, there is an existential concern that we could, in some not-so-distant future, lose control of powerful AIs who, in turn, pursue goals that are antithetical to humanity’s interests and our survival as a species.
DEBATERS • Yoshua Bengio: Full Professor at Université de Montréal, and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute (https://yoshuabengio.org) • Max Tegmark: Professor doing AI and physics research at MIT as part of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence & Fundamental Interactions and the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (https://physics.mit.edu/faculty/max-t...) • Melanie Mitchell: Professor at the Santa Fe Institute (https://melaniemitchell.me) • Yann LeCun: VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta and Silver Professor at NYU affiliated with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences & the Center for Data Science (http://yann.lecun.com)
Complexity scientists have been able to make an impressive amount of progress despite the fact that there is not universal agreement about what "complexity" actually is. We know it when we see it, perhaps, but there are a number of aspects to the phenomenon, and different researchers will naturally focus on their favorites. Today's guest, David Krakauer, is president of the Santa Fe Institute and a longtime researcher in complexity. He points the finger at the concept of agency. A ball rolling down a hill just mindlessly obeys equations of motion, but a complex system gathers information and uses it to adapt. We talk about what that means and how to think about the current state of complexity science.
Consciousness, our experience of being in the world, is one of the mind’s greatest mysteries, but as the neuroscientist Anil Seth explains to Steven Strogatz, research is making progress in understanding this elusive phenomenon.
Which is more intelligent, ChatGPT or a 3-year old? Of course this depends on what we mean by "intelligence." A modern LLM is certainly able to answer all sorts of questions that require knowledge far past the capacity of a 3-year old, and even to perform synthetic tasks that seem remarkable to many human grown-ups. But is that really intelligence? François Chollet argues that it is not, and that LLMs are not ever going to be truly "intelligent" in the usual sense -- although other approaches to AI might get there.
In this episode, we examine how the course of human history has shaped our scientific knowledge, why the physics community prioritizes some questions over others, and why progress in complex systems research is especially difficult. Academia continues to operate within set boundaries and students are taught certain concepts as fundamental and to skirt others completely. However, the history of science demonstrates that such concepts aren’t always set in stone. It’s possible that blowing open the “shackles of reality,” such as redefining the concept of life itself, and reprioritizing the problems that scientists want to tackle, might help scientists make more progress in this very difficult world of complexity research.
Welcome to the first episode of the What ALife! Podcast! In this episode, I speak with Hiroki Sayama - Professor in the Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, and the Director of the Binghamton Center of Complex Systems (CoCo), at Binghamton University (USA) - about all things cellular automata (CA): what they are, where they came from, what they are useful for; as well as his own ground-breaking work in CA systems in the late 90s. We also talk about continuous CA, and what the future of CA might look like. We also discuss his more recent work modelling the spread of covid-19 and how artificial life researchers can help address complex societal problems, based on a short paper of the same name (direct.mit.edu/isal/proceedings/…2021/33/21/102961)
Octopuses, artificial intelligence, and advanced alien civilizations: for many reasons, it's interesting to contemplate ways of thinking other than whatever it is we humans do. How should we think about the space of all possible cognitions? One aspect is simply the physics of the underlying substrate, the physical stuff that is actually doing the thinking. We are used to brains being solid -- squishy, perhaps, but consisting of units in an essentially fixed array. What about liquid brains, where the units can move around? Would an ant colony count? We talk with complexity theorist Ricard Solé about complexity, criticality, and cognition.
A talk given by Elsa Arcaute about bridging the bigger picture in co-creative processes at the "Co-Creating the Future: Participatory Cities and Digital Governance" conference in Vienna in September 2023. For more information on the conference visit: https://www.participatorycities.net.
One of the oldest of network problems is the ranking of individuals, teams, or commodities on the basis of pairwise comparisons between them. For example, if you know which football teams beat which others in a particular year, can you say which team is the best overall? This is a harder problem than it sounds because not all pairs of teams play games in a given season, and also because the outcomes of the games can be ambiguous or contradictory. This talk will introduce the techniques used to solve such ranking problems, with examples from games and sports, consumer research and marketing, and social hierarchies in both animal and human communities, then ask how those techniques can be extended to answer a range of new questions about competition and ranking, including the development of new computer algorithms for ranking, questions about the varying patterns of competition in different sports, and what happens when individuals or teams compete in multiple different ways.
While studying rank dynamics, we have found a universal pattern across a broad variety of phenomena: more relevant elements change their rank slower than the majority of elements. Our hypothesis was that this temporal heterogeneity provides a balance between robustness (slow) and adaptability (fast) similar to criticality, but without the need of fine-tuning parameters. With this motivation, we have studied the effect of different types of heterogeneity (structural, temporal, and functional) in complex systems, and shown that each of these "extend" criticality. We have also used heterogeneity as a simple strategy to improve search algorithms. A question remains open: how to find "optimal" heterogeneity?
Cybersyn was a project created by the Chilean President Salvador Allende. His idea was to build a large digital network serving the socialist government. It was a sort of internet before the internet, that would have made centralization possible, allowing to process an enormous amount of data from all over Chile. However, the project was abruptly interrupted due to the 1973 coup, that brought General Pinochet to power. What would have happened if Allende had completed his project? This podcast delves into the research of the engineers (the Santiago Boys) who helped the Chilean president and, in particular, into the figure of a prominent British technology guru, Stafford Beer. The serie is written and presented by Evgeny Morozov,
Cybersyn era un progetto creato dal presidente cileno Salvador Allende. La sua idea era quella di costruire una grande rete digitale al servizio del governo socialista. Era una sorta di Internet prima di Internet, che avrebbe reso possibile la centralizzazione, consentendo di elaborare un'enorme quantità di dati da tutto il Cile. Tuttavia, il progetto fu interrotto bruscamente a causa del colpo di stato del 1973, che portò al potere il generale Pinochet. Cosa sarebbe successo se Allende avesse completato il suo progetto? Questo podcast approfondisce la ricerca degli ingegneri (i Santiago Boys) che hanno aiutato il presidente cileno e, in particolare, la figura di un importante guru della tecnologia britannica, Stafford Beer. La serie è scritta e presentata da Evgeny Morozov
Abnormal waves of electrical activity can cause a heart’s muscle cells to beat out of sync. In this episode, Flavio Fenton, an expert in cardiac dynamics, talks with Steve Strogatz about ways to treat heart arrhythmias without resorting to painful defibrillators.
An invited presentation at the Conclave on "Complexity in Physical Interacting Systems, Computation and Thermodynamics", July 10-13, 2023, Santa Fe, NM, USA: https://sites.google.com/view/comconc....
"The emergence of global order in complex systems with locally interacting components is most striking at criticality, where small changes in control parameters result in a sudden global reorganization. We study the thermodynamic efficiency of interactions in self-organizing systems, which quantifies the change in the system’s order per unit of work carried out on (or extracted from) the system." [4].
"Importantly, the reduction of entropy achieved through expenditure of work is shown to peak at criticality." [1]
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