The Universality, invarinace, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe---provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of...

We study a restricted version of Shannon's General Purpose Analog Computer in which we only allow the machine to solve linear differential equations. This corresponds to only allowing local feedback in the machine's variables. We show that if this computer is allowed to sense inequalities in a...

This paper extends the literature on the evolution of norms with an agent-based model capturing a phenomenon that has been essentially ignored, namely that individual thought--or computing--is often inversely related to the strength of a social norm. Once a norm is entrenched, we confirm...

A method for identification of nonlinearity and chaos in time series is presented. Nonlinearity is tested using a procedure which combines redundancy and surrogate data techniques. After positive identification of the nonlinear character of the data under study, the possible presence of...

In this paper we investigate the relation between the structure and dynamics of molecules, using a level of coarse graining at which we consider a molecular structure as a "random structure". A random structure consists of (i) a (random) contract graph and (ii) a family of relations imposed on...

The success of Artificial Life depends on whether it will help solving the conceptual problems of biology. Biology may be viewed as the science of the transformation of organizations. And, yet, biology lacks a theory of organization. We use this as an example of the challenge that Artificial...

Army ant colonies display complex foraging raid patterns involving thousands of individuals communicating through chemical trails. In this paper we explore, by means of a simple search algorithm, the properties of these trails in order to test the hypothesis that their structure reflects an...

We develop techniques with general applicability in searching for low dimensional chaotic behavior in non-uniformly sampled time series data. This is done through the analysis of a specific example, viz. post-collapse core oscillations in globular star cluster evolution. Using simulation data...

A foundational assumption in economics is that people are rational -- they choose optimal plans of action given their predictions about future states of the world. In games of strategy this means that each playersÕ strategy should be optimal given his or her prediction of the opponentsÕ...

We address the question "Are some classes of combinatorial optimization problems instrinsically harder than others, without regard to the algorithm one uses, or can difficulty only be assessed relative to particular algorithms?" <p> We provide a measure of the hardness of a particular optimization...</p>