In this study, we explore the relationships among group size, the extent of interactions with other groups, and group performance in a stochastic environment. We have developed a modeling framework which allows the connections among the individual members constituting a group and the connections...

In this paper we address the problem of program discovery as defined by Genetic Programming. We have two major results: First, by combining a hierarchical crossover operator with two traditional single point search algorithms: Simulated Annealing and Stochastic Iterated Hill Climbing, we have...

For some 40 years almost all electronic phenomena inmetals have been interpreted in terms of a general theoretical framework which one could variously call renormalized free particle theory, Fermi liquid theory, or "AGD" after the best-known book on the subject. <p> I came to the conclusion a few...</p>

A number of recent attempts to understand broad priniples of energy transduction in biological systems have focused on correlation ratchets---systems which extract work out of fluctuations which are correlated in time.[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] Correlation ratchets are ``information engines'' analogous...

An elementary model of animal aggregation is presented. The gorup size distributions resulting from this model are truncated power laws. The predictions of the model are found to be consistent with data that describe the group size distributions of tuna fish, sardinellas, and African buffalos.<p> <p>...</p></p>

Computational mechanics, an approach to structural complexity, defines a process's causal states and gives a procedure for finding them. We show that the causal-state representation--an e-machine--is the minimal one consistent with accurate prediction. We establish several results on e-machine...

The fossil record of life has been shown to provide evidence for scaling laws in both time series and in some statistical features. This evidence was suggested to be linked with a self-organized critical phenomenon by several authors. In this paper we review some of these models and their...

A dynamical-systems-based model of computation is studied. We demonstrate the computational ability of nonlinear mappings. There exists a switching map system with two types of baker's map to emulate any Turing machine. Taking non-hyperbolic mappings with second-order nonlinearity (e.g., the...

This paper introduces a new analysis tool called {\it reverse hillclimbing}, and demonstrates how it can be used to evaluate the performance of a genetic algorithm. Using reverse hillclimbing, one can calculate the exact probability that hillclimbing will attain some point in a landscape. From...