Complexes

For millennia people have wondered what makes the living different from the non-living. Beginning in the mid-1980s, artificial life has studied living systems using a synthetic approach: build life in order to understand it better, be it by means of software, hardware, or wetware. This review provides a summary of the advances that led to the development of artificial life, its current research topics, and open problems and opportunities. We classify artificial life research into 14 themes: origins of life, autonomy, self-organization, adaptation (including evolution, development, and learning), ecology, artificial societies, behavior, computational biology, artificial chemistries, information, living technology, art, and philosophy. Being interdisciplinary, artificial life seems to be losing its boundaries and merging with other fields. Aguilar W, Santamaría-Bonfil G, Froese T and Gershenson C (2014) The past, present, and future of artificial life. Front. Robot. AI 1:8. http://dx....

Ashby's law of requisite variety states that a controller must have at least as much variety (complexity) as the controlled. Maturana and Varela proposed autopoiesis (self-production) to define living systems. Living systems also require to fulfill the law of requisite variety. A measure of autopoiesis has been proposed as the ratio between the complexity of a system and the complexity of its environment. Self-organization can be used as a concept to guide the design of systems towards higher values of autopoiesis, with the potential of making technology more "living", i.e. adaptive and robust. Requisite Variety, Autopoiesis, and Self-organization Carlos Gershenson Invited keynote at WOSC 2014 http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.7475

Education at all levels is facing several challenges in most countries [1-4], such as low quality, high costs, lack of educators, and unsatisfied student demand. Traditional approaches are becoming unable to deliver the required education. Several causes for this inefficiency can be identified. I argue that beyond specific causes, the lack of effective education is related to complexity [5, 6]. However, information technology is helping us overcome this complexity. Complexity can be measured with information theory and can be seen as the balance between stability and variability [7-10]: phenomena without change or with constant change cannot exhibit complex behavior. It has been noted that to actively control a complex system, the controller has to be at least as complex as the controlled [11, 12]. For example, a successful healthcare provider has to match the complexity of the patients she attends. Treatment is highly specific for different patients, so a general practitioner must ha...

Upshot : The limitations of materialism for studying cognition have motivated alternative epistemologies based on information and computation. I argue that these alternatives are also inherently limited and that these limits can only be overcome by considering materialism, info-computationalism, and cognition at the same time. Open peer commentary on the article “ Info-computational Constructivism and Cognition ” by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic. Gershenson C. (2014) Info-computationalism or Materialism? Neither and Both. Constructivist Foundations 9(2) : 241–242. Available at  http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/9/2/241.gershenson

The 16th International Congress of Systems and Cybernetics WOSC2014 will take place on October 15-17 a the University of Ibagué, Colombia. One of the congress themes is  Design and Control of Self-organising Systems Many real-world problems are non-stationary and highly complex. That is, they are changing constantly and interacting, generating novel information that limits prediction. If the change is faster than our ability to optimize our solutions, then these will be obsolete. As an alternative, we have designed adaptive systems, in many cases inspired in biology. One approach for designing adaptive systems has been proposed with the use of self-organization: instead of trying to optimize a problem, the aim is to design components of a system that by local interactions actively search for their best configuration. When designed properly, self-organizing systems can adapt to extremely dynamic and complex problems at the same scales at which changes occur. As our systems beco...

Cybernetics and Systems Research (CSR) were developed in the mid-twentieth century, offering the possibility of describing and comparing different phenomena using the same language. The concepts which originated in CSR have spread to practically all disciplines, many now used within the scientific study of complex systems. CSR has the potential to contribute to the solution of relevant problems, but the path towards this goal is not straightforward. This paper summarizes the ideas presented by the authors during a round table in 2012 on the past, present and future of CSR. The Past, Present and Future of Cybernetics and Systems Research Carlos Gershenson, Peter Csermely, Peter Erdi, Helena Knyazeva, Alexander Laszlo http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.6317

Summary of "The Past, Present and Future of Cybernetics and Systems Research" Symposium M at  European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR), Vienna, Austria, April 12, 2012. Organizer: Carlos Gershenson This guided reflection on the challenges and opportunities of cybernetics and systems research (CSR) included initial interventions by panelists Peter Erdi, Helena Knyazeva, Stefan Thurner, Peter Csermely, and Alexander Lazlo. Afterwards, the floor was opened to interventions from the general public and further interventions by panelists. Commentaries were made from a broad variety of perspectives, but several general ideas can be distilled from the discussion. CSR have strongly influenced all scientific disciplines. As an example, the term "system" is used commonly in daily language. One of the breakthroughs of CSR lies in the search of commonalities across disciplines. Even when this was achieved to a certain degree, there is still a lack of...