Month: February 2024

What can physics tell us about ourselves?

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.

Listen at: complexity.simplecast.com

A Random Boolean Network shifted toward a critical point

Tomoko Sakiyama

Physica Scripta

Random Boolean Networks (RBNs) model complex networks with numerous variables, serving as a tool for gene expression and genetic regulation modeling. RBNs exhibit phase transitions, contingent on node degrees. Given the significance of phase transitions in collective behaviors, the study explores the relationship between RBNs and actual living system networks, which also display critical behaviors. Notably, living systems exhibit such behaviors even beyond the predicted critical point in RBNs. This paper introduces a novel RBNs model incorporating a rewiring process for edge connections/disconnections. In contrast to prior studies, our model includes artificial genes occasionally adding self-loops and creating an instant and temporal lookup table. Consequently, our proposed model demonstrates the edge of chaos at higher node degrees. It serves as an abstract RBNs model generating noisy behaviors from internal agent processes without external parameter tuning.

Read the full article at: iopscience.iop.org

Calls for the 2024 CSS Emerging Researcher, Junior, and Senior Scientific Awards

The Complex Systems Society announces the ninth edition of the CSS Scientific Awards. 

The Emerging Researcher Award recognizes promising researchers in Complex Systems within 3 years of the PhD defense.

The Junior Scientific Award is aimed at recognizing excellent scientific record of young researchers within 10 years of the PhD defense.

The Senior Scientific Award will recognize outstanding contributions of Complex Systems scholars at whatever stage of their careers.

Deadline: April 30th, 2024.

See https://cxdig.wordpress.com/community/awards for the list of previous awardees.

More at: cssociety.org