A class of autocatalytic reaction networks based on template dependent ligation and higher order catalysis is analyzed. Apart from an irreversible ligation reaction we consider only reversible aggregation steps that provide a realistic description of molecular recognition. The over-all dynamics...

We introduce a new class of models in which a large number of "agents" organize under the influence of an externally imposed coherent noise. The model shows reorganization events whose size distribution closely follows a power-law over many decades, even in the case where the agents do not...

We propose a method for modelling economic systems in which outcomes depend locally on the predictions that agents make of other agents. We develop populations games in which each agent adaptively searches for a good model of its environment. We demonstrate that such systems can exhibit...

Some authors have hypothesized that the observed self-synchronized activity in ant colonies provides some adaptive advantages, and, in particular, it has been suggested that task realization may benefit from this ordered temporal pattern of behavior (Robinson, 1992; Hatcher et al., 1992). In this...

Thermodynamic depth is an appealing but flawed complexity measure. It depends on a set of macroscopic states for a system, but neither its original introduction by Lloyd and Pagels nor any follow-up work has considered how to select these states. Depth, therefore, is at root subjective....

Economic choices involving pollution, like those concerning common resources, relate to the emergence of cooperation among actors. Since pollution propagates in space, the temporal dynamics of economic choices is coupled to the spatial dynamics of pollution. We start from a simple description of...

In an influential paper, Grafen (1990) provided a mathematical demonstration of the validity of Zahavi's handicap principle . Grafen showed how an honest signalling system is stabilized through costly signalling: cost stabilizes the system when the cost of lying is greater than any benefit...

Particle-like objects are observed to propagate and interact in many spatially extended dynamical systems. For one of the simplest classes of such systems, one-dimensional cellular automata, we establish a rigorous upper bound on the number of distinct products that these interactions can...

A dynamical model of an ecological community is analyzed within a "mean-field approximation" in which one of the species interacts with the combination of all of the other species in the community. Within this approximation the model may be formulated as a master equation describing a one-step...

In this paper we investigate error-thresholds on dynamics fitness-landscapes. We show that there exists both a lower and an upper threshold, representing limits to the copying fidelity of simple replicators. The lower bound can be expressed as a correction term to the error-threshold present on...