Networking the complexity community since 1999
Month: September 2024
The Winter Workshop on Complex Systems is a one-week workshop where young researchers worldwide come together to work on interdisciplinary projects around complex systems.
The primary focus of the workshop is for participants to engage into novel research projects.
This is the 10th edition of the WWCS and it will be held in Rifugio Madonna delle Nevi (Lombardy, Italy) from the 26th to the 31st of January 2025.
More at: wwcs2025.github.io
The Complex World, originally published in Volume 1 of Foundational Papers in Complexity Science, presents an entirely new framing of nature, of the human role in the natural and technological worlds, and what it means to prosper on a living planet.
We live in a complex world—meaning one that is increasingly connected, evolving, technological, volatile, and potentially poised for catastrophe. And yet we continue to treat the world as if it were simple: linear, unchanging, disconnected, and infinitely exploitable.
Complexity science is an approach to understanding and surviving in a complex world. In this concise and comprehensive introduction, Santa Fe Institute President David C. Krakauer traces the roots of complexity science back to the nineteenth-century science of machines—evolved and engineered—into the twentieth-century science of emergent systems.
By combining insights from evolution, computation, nonlinear dynamics, and statistical physics, complexity science provides the first scientific framework for understanding the purposeful universe.
More at: www.sfipress.org
YI ZHAO, THOMAS P. WYTOCK, KIMBERLY A. REYNOLDS, AND ADILSON E. MOTTER
SCIENCE ADVANCES
28 Aug 2024
Vol 10, Issue 35
Irreversibility, in which a transient perturbation leaves a system in a new state, is an emergent property in systems of interacting entities. This property has well-established implications in statistical physics but remains underexplored in biological networks, especially for bacteria and other prokaryotes whose regulation of gene expression occurs predominantly at the transcriptional level. Focusing on the reconstructed regulatory network of Escherichia coli, we examine network responses to transient single-gene perturbations. We predict irreversibility in numerous cases and find that the incidence of irreversibility increases with the proximity of the perturbed gene to positive circuits in the network. Comparison with experimental data suggests a connection between the predicted irreversibility to transient perturbations and the evolutionary response to permanent perturbations.
Read the full article at: www.science.org
Ilya Horiguchi, Takahide Yoshida, Takashi Ikegami
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have spurred a surge of interest in leveraging these models for game-theoretical simulations, where LLMs act as individual agents engaging in social interactions. This study explores the potential for LLM agents to spontaneously generate and adhere to normative strategies through natural language discourse, building upon the foundational work of Axelrod’s metanorm games. Our experiments demonstrate that through dialogue, LLM agents can form complex social norms, such as metanorms-norms enforcing the punishment of those who do not punish cheating-purely through natural language interaction. The results affirm the effectiveness of using LLM agents for simulating social interactions and understanding the emergence and evolution of complex strategies and norms through natural language. Future work may extend these findings by incorporating a wider range of scenarios and agent characteristics, aiming to uncover more nuanced mechanisms behind social norm formation.
Read the full article at: arxiv.org
Society is reaching a tipping point. The future remains not only uncertain but also seemingly unpredictable, however, using the science of self-organised criticality, the phenomenon describing how small events can create large ripples in networks, this may no longer be the case. In this piece, Dan Braha presents his physics-informed model of civil unrest and shows not only how we can use it to forecast riots and violent disorder, but how in using the ideas of self-organized criticality smaller movements can better work to topple oppressive regimes.
Read the full article at: iai.tv
Complexity Digest 