Patrick McGivern

Adaptive Behavior

 

Work on minimal cognition raises a variety of questions concerning the boundaries of cognition. Many discussions of minimal cognition assume that the domain of minimal cognition is a subset of the domain of the living. In this article, I consider whether non-living ‘active materials’ ought to be included as instances of minimal cognition. I argue that seeing such cases as ‘minimal models’ of (minimal) cognition requires recognising them as members of a class of systems sharing the same basic features and exhibiting the same general patterns of behaviour. Minimal cognition in this sense is a very inclusive concept: rather than specifying some threshold level of cognition or a type of cognition found only in very simple systems, it is a concept of cognition associated with very minimal criteria that pick out only the most essential requirements for a system to exhibit cognitive behaviour.

Source: journals.sagepub.com

To scientists’ surprise, blended mixtures of cytoplasm can reorganize themselves into cell-like compartments with working structural components.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org

Ramil Nigmatullin, Mikhail Prokopenko

 

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 re-organization. We introduce a measure of thermodynamic efficiency of interactions in self-organizing systems, which quantifies the change in the system’s order per unit work carried out on (or extracted from) the system. We analytically derive the thermodynamic efficiency of interactions for the case of quasi-static variations of control parameters in the exactly solvable Curie-Weiss (fully connected) Ising model, and demonstrate that this quantity diverges at the critical point of a second order phase transition. This divergence is shown for quasi-static perturbations in both control parameters, the external field and the coupling strength. Our analysis formalizes an intuitive understanding of thermodynamic efficiency across diverse self-organizing dynamics in physical, biological and social domains.

Source: arxiv.org

V.A. Traag

 

Articles in high-impact journals are by definition more highly cited on average. But are they cited more often because the articles are somehow "better"? Or are they cited more often simply because they appeared in a high-impact journal? Although some evidence suggests the latter the causal relationship is not clear. We here compare citations of published journal articles to citations of their preprint versions to uncover the causal mechanism. We build on an earlier model to infer the causal effect of journals on citations. We find evidence for both effects. We show that high-impact journals seem to select articles that tend to attract more citations. At the same time, we find that high-impact journals augment the citation rate of published articles. Our results yield a deeper understanding of the role of journals in the research system. The use of journal metrics in research evaluation has been increasingly criticised in recent years and article-level citations are sometimes suggested as an alternative. Our results show that removing impact factors from evaluation does not negate the influence of journals. This insight has important implications for changing practices of research evaluation.

Source: arxiv.org

Jose C. Valverde, Henning S. Mortveit, Carlos Gershenson, and Yongtang Shi

Complexity
Volume 2020, Article ID 6183798

 

In recent decades, Boolean networks (BN) have emerged as an effective mathematical tool to model not only computational processes, but also several phenomena in science and engineering. For this reason, the development of the theory of such models has become a compelling need that has attracted the interest of many research groups in recent years. Dynamics of BN are traditionally associated with complexity, since they are composed of many elemental units whose behavior is relatively simple in comparison with the behavior of the entire system.

BN are a generalization of other relevant mathematical models, which appeared previously as cellular automata (CA), inspired by von Neumann and studied by Wolfram and others to explore the computational universe, or Kauffman networks (KN), proposed by Kauffman in 1969 for modeling gene regulatory networks. This gives an idea of the versatility of this new paradigm in applications to several branches of science (mathematics, physics chemistry, biology, ecology, etc.) and engineering (computing, artificial intelligence, electronics, circuits, etc.).

The aim of this special issue was to collect cutting-edge research on the different models of BN (deterministic and nondeterministic, synchronous and asynchronous, homogenous and non-homogenous, directed and undirected, regular and non-regular, etc.). Thus, several research groups in this field submitted their recent developments and future research directions concerning new models. In addition, original research articles showing some applications of BN in science and engineering were received.

 

Source: www.hindawi.com