No Arabic abstract
We argue that the coordination of the activities of individual complex agents enables a system to develop and sustain complexity at a higher level. We exemplify relevant mechanisms through computer simulations of a toy system, a coupled map lattice with transmission delays. The coordination here is achieved through the synchronization of the chaotic operations of the individual elements, and on the basis of this, regular behavior at a longer temporal scale emerges that is inaccessible to the uncoupled individual dynamics.
An thorough introduction is given at an introductory level to the field of quantitative complex system science, with special emphasis on emergence in dynamical systems based on network topologies. Subjects treated include graph theory and small-world networks, a generic introduction to the concepts of dynamical system theory, random Boolean networks, cellular automata and self-organized criticality, the statistical modeling of Darwinian evolution, synchronization phenomena and an introduction to the theory of cognitive systems. It inludes chapter on Graph Theory and Small-World Networks, Chaos, Bifurcations and Diffusion, Complexity and Information Theory, Random Boolean Networks, Cellular Automata and Self-Organized Criticality, Darwinian evolution, Hypercycles and Game Theory, Synchronization Phenomena and Elements of Cognitive System Theory.
We define Persistent Mutual Information (PMI) as the Mutual (Shannon) Information between the past history of a system and its evolution significantly later in the future. This quantifies how much past observations enable long term prediction, which we propose as the primary signature of (Strong) Emergent Behaviour. The key feature of our definition of PMI is the omission of an interval of present time, so that the mutual information between close times is excluded: this renders PMI robust to superposed noise or chaotic behaviour or graininess of data, distinguishing it from a range of established Complexity Measures. For the logistic map we compare predicted with measured long-time PMI data. We show that measured PMI data captures not just the period doubling cascade but also the associated cascade of banded chaos, without confusion by the overlayer of chaotic decoration. We find that the standard map has apparently infinite PMI, but with well defined fractal scaling which we can interpret in terms of the relative information codimension. Whilst our main focus is in terms of PMI over time, we can also apply the idea to PMI across space in spatially-extended systems as a generalisation of the notion of ordered phases.
The Potts model is one of the most popular spin models of statistical physics. The prevailing majority of work done so far corresponds to the lattice version of the model. However, many natural or man-made systems are much better described by the topology of a network. We consider the q-state Potts model on an uncorrelated scale-free network for which the node-degree distribution manifests a power-law decay governed by the exponent lambda. We work within the mean-field approximation, since for systems on random uncorrelated scale-free networks this method is known to often give asymptotically exact results. Depending on particular values of q and lambda one observes either a first-order or a second-order phase transition or the system is ordered at any finite temperature. In a case study, we consider the limit q=1 (percolation) and find a correspondence between the magnetic exponents and those describing percolation on a scale-free network. Interestingly, logarithmic corrections to scaling appear at lambda=4 in this case.
Complex chemical reaction networks, which underlie many industrial and biological processes, often exhibit non-monotonic changes in chemical species concentrations, typically described using nonlinear models. Such non-monotonic dynamics are in principle possible even in linear models if the matrices defining the models are non-normal, as characterized by a necessarily non-orthogonal set of eigenvectors. However, the extent to which non-normality is responsible for non-monotonic behavior remains an open question. Here, using a master equation to model the reaction dynamics, we derive a general condition for observing non-monotonic dynamics of individual species, establishing that non-normality promotes non-monotonicity but is not a requirement for it. In contrast, we show that non-normality is a requirement for non-monotonic dynamics to be observed in the Renyi entropy. Using hydrogen combustion as an example application, we demonstrate that non-monotonic dynamics under experimental conditions are supported by a linear chain of connected components, in contrast with the dominance of a single giant component observed in typical random reaction networks. The exact linearity of the master equation enables development of rigorous theory and simulations for dynamical networks of unprecedented size (approaching $10^5$ dynamical variables, even for a network of only 20 reactions and involving less than 100 atoms). Our conclusions are expected to hold for other combustion processes, and the general theory we develop is applicable to all chemical reaction networks, including biological ones.
A large number of complex systems find a natural abstraction in the form of weighted networks whose nodes represent the elements of the system and the weighted edges identify the presence of an interaction and its relative strength. In recent years, the study of an increasing number of large scale networks has highlighted the statistical heterogeneity of their interaction pattern, with degree and weight distributions which vary over many orders of magnitude. These features, along with the large number of elements and links, make the extraction of the truly relevant connections forming the networks backbone a very challenging problem. More specifically, coarse-graining approaches and filtering techniques are at struggle with the multiscale nature of large scale systems. Here we define a filtering method that offers a practical procedure to extract the relevant connection backbone in complex multiscale networks, preserving the edges that represent statistical significant deviations with respect to a null model for the local assignment of weights to edges. An important aspect of the method is that it does not belittle small-scale interactions and operates at all scales defined by the weight distribution. We apply our method to real world network instances and compare the obtained results with alternative backbone extraction techniques.