Adam Safron, Dalton A. R. Sakthivadivel, Zahra Sheikhbahaee, Magnus Bein, Adeel Razi and Michael Levin

Symmetry is a motif featuring in almost all areas of science. Symmetries appear throughout the natural world, making them particularly important in our quest to understand the structure of the world around us. Symmetries and invariances are often first principles pointing to some lawful description of an observation, with explanations being understood as both ‘satisfying’ and potentially useful in their regularity. The sense of aesthetic beauty accompanying such explanations is reminiscent of our understanding of intelligence in terms of the ability to efficiently predict (or compress) data; indeed, identifying and building on symmetry can offer a particularly elegant description of a physical situation. The study of symmetries is so fundamental to mathematics and physics that one might ask where else it proves useful. This theme issue poses the question: what does the study of symmetry, and symmetry breaking, have to offer for the study of life and the mind?

Interface Focus Volume 13 Issue 3

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Vincent J Straub, Milena Tsvetkova, and Taha Yasseri

Collective Intelligence

Humans and other intelligent agents often rely on collective decision making based on an intuition that groups outperform individuals. However, at present, we lack a complete theoretical understanding of when groups perform better. Here, we examine performance in collective decision making in the context of a real-world citizen science task environment in which individuals with manipulated differences in task-relevant training collaborated. We find 1) dyads gradually improve in performance but do not experience a collective benefit compared to individuals in most situations; 2) the cost of coordination to efficiency and speed that results when switching to a dyadic context after training individually is consistently larger than the leverage of having a partner, even if they are expertly trained in that task; and 3) on the most complex tasks having an additional expert in the dyad who is adequately trained improves accuracy. These findings highlight that the extent of training received by an individual, the complexity of the task at hand, and the desired performance indicator are all critical factors that need to be accounted for when weighing up the benefits of collective decision making.

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Pietro Foini, Michele Tizzoni, Giulia Martini, Daniela Paolotti & Elisa Omodei 
Scientific Reports volume 13, Article number: 2793 (2023)

Food insecurity, defined as the lack of physical or economic access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food, remains one of the main challenges included in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Near real-time data on the food insecurity situation collected by international organizations such as the World Food Programme can be crucial to monitor and forecast time trends of insufficient food consumption levels in countries at risk. Here, using food consumption observations in combination with secondary data on conflict, extreme weather events and economic shocks, we build a forecasting model based on gradient boosted regression trees to create predictions on the evolution of insufficient food consumption trends up to 30 days in to the future in 6 countries (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Mali, Nigeria, Syria and Yemen). Results show that the number of available historical observations is a key element for the forecasting model performance. Among the 6 countries studied in this work, for those with the longest food insecurity time series, that is Syria and Yemen, the proposed forecasting model allows to forecast the prevalence of people with insufficient food consumption up to 30 days into the future with higher accuracy than a naive approach based on the last measured prevalence only. The framework developed in this work could provide decision makers with a tool to assess how the food insecurity situation will evolve in the near future in countries at risk. Results clearly point to the added value of continuous near real-time data collection at sub-national level.

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Josh Bongard
Artificial Life and Robotics (2023)

For much of the history of robotics, robots have been built from inert, inorganic, bulk material, such as metals, plastics, and ceramics. However, advances in materials science are driving the development of soft robots made from increasingly exotic but still inorganic materials. Similarly, synthetic biology has recently provided the ability to build ‘biobots’ completely from biological materials. This is driven new use cases for mobile robots, but it is also allowing new questions to be posed about how both body plan and neural control jointly facilitate the evolution of intelligent behavior.

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David C. Krakauer

Interface Focus Volume 13 Issue 3

Complex phenomena are made possible when: (i) fundamental physical symmetries are broken and (ii) from the set of broken symmetries historically selected ground states are applied to performing mechanical work and storing adaptive information. Over the course of several decades Philip Anderson enumerated several key principles that can follow from broken symmetry in complex systems. These include emergence, frustrated random functions, autonomy and generalized rigidity. I describe these as the four Anderson Principles all of which are preconditions for the emergence of evolved function. I summarize these ideas and discuss briefly recent extensions that engage with the related concept of functional symmetry breaking, inclusive of information, computation and causality.

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