Gerardo L. Febres

Entropy 2024, 26(9), 754

This document introduces methods for describing long texts as groups of repeating symbols or patterns. The process converts a series of real-number values into texts. Developed tailored algorithms for identifying repeated sequences in the text are applied to decompose the text into nested tree-like structures of repeating symbols and is called the Nested Repeated Sequence Decomposition Model (NRSDM). The NRSDM is especially valuable for extracting repetitive behaviors in oscillatory but non-periodic and chaotic processes where the classical Fourier transform has limited application. The NRSDM along with the two graphical representations proposed here form a promising tool for characterizing long texts configured to represent the behavior of unidimensional processes.

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DAVID KRAKAUER & DAVID WOLPERT

What is reality? And is there just one reality or many, perhaps infinitely many? And how should we describe these realities, with mathematics, natural language, music, or visual art? The answer might be all of the above, but if so, can we justify these decisions based on a larger conception of reality?

Scientists tend to think about reality in one of two ways. The first perspective involves physically emergent hierarchies (ontologies)—ranging from the most “fundamental” elementary particles, through nuclear and atomic physics, collective chemistry, adaptive organisms and ecosystems, brains, minds, and, ultimately, human societies.

The second describes conceptually emergent hierarchies (epistemologies)—spanning logic, mathematics, natural language, natural science, and the arts. This perspective focuses on the cognitive and conceptual structures that humans create to describe the physical hierarchies in which they are embedded.

Increasingly these two ideas of reality—architectures of physical matter and conceptual information—are intersecting. Several contemporary areas of research are blurring the boundary between theories of reality and reality itself. The clearest example of this would be in the social sciences, where “social reality” and a model or theory of society are often difficult to disentangle. For example, does a formalism like John Nash’s non-cooperative game theory describe strategic interactions, or does game theory control strategic interactions? How might we ever disentangle these two possibilities?

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See Also: The Reality Issue

Roli, A.; Braccini, M.; Stano, P.

 Systems 2024, 12, 338.

Noise and error are usually considered to be disturbances negatively affecting the behavior of a system. Nevertheless, from a systemic perspective, taking into account openness and incompleteness of complex systems, noise and error may assume a creative, constructive, and positive role in that they are a source of novelty that can trigger the reorganization of the system, the growth of complexity, and the emergence of new meaning. Examples of this phenomenon can be found in evolutionary phenomena driven by affordances, the formation of new attractors in dynamic systems responding to external perturbations, and improvisation in music. We argue that it is possible to identify general properties that enable the positive effect of noise and errors in complex systems, namely, multilevel organization, redundancy, incompleteness, and criticality. These properties play a major role in living systems and can guide the design of robust and adaptive artificial systems.

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Qianyang Chen, Mikhail Prokopenko

Collective behaviours are frequently observed to self-organise to criticality. Existing proposals to explain these phenomena, such as Self-organised Criticality (SOC), are fragmented across disciplines and only partially answer the question. This paper investigates the underlying, intrinsic, utilities that may explain self-organisation of collective behaviours near criticality. We focus on information-driven approaches such as predictive information, empowerment, and active inference, as well as thermodynamic efficiency, which incorporates both information-theoretic and thermodynamic quantities. By interpreting the Ising model as a perception-action loop, we compare how different intrinsic utilities shape collective behaviour and analyse the distinct characteristics that arise when each is optimised. In particular, we highlight that at the critical regime thermodynamic efficiency balances the predictability gained by the system and its energy costs. Finally, we propose the Principle of Super-efficiency, suggesting that collective behaviours self-organise to the critical regime where optimal efficiency is achieved with respect to the entropy reduction relative to the thermodynamic costs.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org

Eduardo Sampaio, Vivek H. Sridhar, Fritz A. Francisco, Máté Nagy, Ada Sacchi, Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin, Paul Nührenberg, Rui Rosa, Iain D. Couzin & Simon Gingins
Nature Ecology & Evolution (2024)

Collective behaviour, social interactions and leadership in animal groups are often driven by individual differences. However, most studies focus on same-species groups, in which individual variation is relatively low. Multispecies groups, however, entail interactions among highly divergent phenotypes, ranging from simple exploitative actions to complex coordinated networks. Here we studied hunting groups of otherwise-solitary Octopus cyanea and multiple fish species, to unravel hidden mechanisms of leadership and associated dynamics in functional nature and complexity, when divergence is maximized. Using three-dimensional field-based tracking and field experiments, we found that these groups exhibit complex functional dynamics and composition-dependent properties. Social influence is hierarchically distributed over multiscale dimensions representing role specializations: fish (particularly goatfish) drive environmental exploration, deciding where, while the octopus decides if, and when, the group moves. Thus, ‘classical leadership’ can be insufficient to describe complex heterogeneous systems, in which leadership instead can be driven by both stimulating and inhibiting movement. Furthermore, group composition altered individual investment and collective action, triggering partner control mechanisms (that is, punching) and benefits for the de facto leader, the octopus. This seemingly non-social invertebrate flexibly adapts to heterospecific actions, showing hallmarks of social competence and cognition. These findings expand our current understanding of what leadership is and what sociality is.

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