Previous work on coevolutionary search has demonstrated both successful and unsuccessful applications. As a step in explaining what factors lead to success or failure, we present a comparative study of an evolutionary and a coevolutionary search model. In the latter model, strategies for solving...

Evolving one-dimensional cellular automata (CAs) with genetic algorithms has provided insight into how improved performance on a task requiring global coordination emerges when only local interactions are possible. Two approaches that can affect the search efficiency of the genetic algorithm are...

A number of authors have in recent years proposed that the processes of macroevolution may give rise to self-organized critical phenomena which could have a significant effect on the dynamics of ecosystems. In particular, it has been suggested that mass extinction may arise through a purely...

Self-organization was originally introduced in the context of physics and chemistry to describe how microscopic processes give rise to macroscopic structures in out-of-equilibrium systems. Recent research, that extends this concept to ethology, suggests that it provides a concise description of...

A simple model of recruitment-based foraging in ants illustrates the idea that synchronized patterns of activity can endow a colony with the ability to forage more efficiently when a minimal number of active individuals is required to establish and maintain food source exploitation. This model,...

A simple model of the emergence of pillars in termite nests (Deneubourg, 1977) is modified to include several additional features that break the homogeneity of the original model: (1) a convection air stream that drives molecules of pheromone along a given direction, (2) a net flux of...

The paper discusses the role of self-organizing phenomena like emergence of infrastructure and self-organizing criticality in a spatial economy. Some theoretical models are discussed and reviewed. Computer models in the form of simple cellular automata, similar to the game "Life" and Schelling's...

Why are some ecosystems so rich, but yet contain so many rare species? High species diversity, together with rarity, is a general trend in neotropical forests and coral reefs. But the origin of such diversity and the consequences of food web complexity in both species abundances and temporal...

Most models of natural selection assume either that the material environment remains constant or that it fluctuates in ways unrelated to changes in gene frequencies (and therefore changes in the distribution of phenotypes) of the organism undergoing selection. In this paper, we consider what...

In the study of complex systems---in particular self-organizing systems---the notions of emergence and higher order structures come up. A framework for studying them was given in [1,2] where the notion of a hyperstructures occur both in an intuitive and a formal sense. But in formalizations of...