8,027 research outputs found
Extending the Modern Synthesis: The evolution of ecosystems
The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis formalizes the role of variation, heredity, differential reproduction and mutation in population genetics. Here we explore a mathematical structure, based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory, that instantiates the punctuated dynamic relations of organisms and their embedding environments. The mathematical overhead is considerable, and we conclude that the model must itself be extended even further to allow the possibility of the transfer of heritage information between different classes of organisms. In essence, we provide something of a formal roadmap for the modernization of the Modern Synthesis
Unnatural Selection: A new formal approach to punctuated equilibrium in economic systems
Generalized Darwinian evolutionary theory has emerged as central to the description of economic process (e.g., Aldrich et. al., 2008). Here we demonstrate that, just as Darwinian principles provide necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for understanding the dynamics of social entities, in a similar manner the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory provide another set of necessary conditions that constrain the evolution of socioeconomic process. These latter constraints can, however, easily be formulated as a statistics-like analytic toolbox for the study of empirical data that is consistent with a generalized Darwinism, and this is no small thing
Toward Cultural Oncology: The Evolutionary Information Dynamics of Cancer
'Racial' disparities among cancers, particularly of the breast and prostate, are something of a mystery. For the US, in the face of slavery and its sequelae, centuries of interbreeding have greatly leavened genetic differences between 'Blacks' and 'whites', but marked contrasts in disease prevalence and progression persist. 'Adjustment' for socioeconomic status and lifestyle, while statistically accounting for much of the variance in breast cancer, only begs the question of ultimate causality. Here we propose a more basic biological explanation that extends the theory of immune cognition to include elaborate tumor control mechanisms constituting the principal selection pressure acting on pathologically mutating cell clones. The interplay between them occurs in the context of an embedding, highly structured, system of culturally specific psychosocial stress which we find is able to literally write an image of itself onto disease progression. The dynamics are analogous to punctuated equilibrium in simple evolutionary proces
The roundtable: an abstract model of conversation dynamics
Is it possible to abstract a formal mechanism originating schisms and
governing the size evolution of social conversations? In this work a
constructive solution to such problem is proposed: an abstract model of a
generic N-party turn-taking conversation. The model develops from simple yet
realistic assumptions derived from experimental evidence, abstracts from
conversation content and semantics while including topological information, and
is driven by stochastic dynamics. We find that a single mechanism - namely the
dynamics of conversational party's individual fitness, as related to
conversation size - controls the development of the self-organized schisming
phenomenon. Potential generalizations of the model - including individual
traits and preferences, memory effects and more elaborated conversational
topologies - may find important applications also in other fields of research,
where dynamically-interacting and networked agents play a fundamental role.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, to be published in Journal of Artificial
Societies and Social Simulatio
Evolutionary Markovian Strategies in 2 x 2 Spatial Games
Evolutionary spatial 2 x 2 games between heterogeneous agents are analyzed
using different variants of cellular automata (CA). Agents play repeatedly
against their nearest neighbors 2 x 2 games specified by a rescaled payoff
matrix with two parameteres. Each agent is governed by a binary Markovian
strategy (BMS) specified by 4 conditional probabilities [p_R, p_S, p_T, p_P]
that take values 0 or 1. The initial configuration consists in a random
assignment of "strategists" among the 2^4= 16 possible BMS. The system then
evolves within strategy space according to the simple standard rule: each agent
copies the strategy of the neighbor who got the highest payoff. Besides on the
payoff matrix, the dominant strategy -and the degree of cooperation- depend on
i) the type of the neighborhood (von Neumann or Moore); ii) the way the
cooperation state is actualized (deterministically or stochastichally); and
iii) the amount of noise measured by a parameter epsilon. However a robust
winner strategy is [1,0,1,1].Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures (7 of these figures contain 4 encapsulapted
poscript files each
Culture and Cancer
Genetic mechanisms, since they broadly involve information
transmission, should be translatable into information dynamics formalism. From this perspective we reconsider the adaptive mutator, one possible means of 'second order selection' by which a highly structured 'language' of environment and development writes itself onto the variation upon which evolutionary selection and tumorigenesis operate. Our approach uses recent results in the spirit of the Large Deviations Program of applied probability that permit transfer of phase transition approaches from statistical mechanics to information theory, generating evolutionary and developmental punctuation in what we claim to be a highly natural manner
Continuous Quantum Error Correction Through Local Operations
We propose local strategies to protect global quantum information. The
protocols, which are quantum error correcting codes for dissipative systems,
are based on environment measurements, direct feedback control and simple
encoding of the logical qubits into physical qutrits whose decaying transitions
are indistinguishable and equally probable. The simple addition of one extra
level in the description of the subsystems allows for local actions to fully
and deterministically protect global resources, such as entanglement. We
present codes for both quantum jump and quantum state diffusion measurement
strategies and test them against several sources of inefficiency. The use of
qutrits in information protocols suggests further characterization of
qutrit-qutrit disentanglement dynamics, which we also give together with simple
local environment measurement schemes able to prevent distillability sudden
death and even enhance entanglement in situations in which our feedback error
correction is not possible.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
VirtFogSim: A parallel toolbox for dynamic energy-delay performance testing and optimization of 5G Mobile-Fog-Cloud virtualized platforms
It is expected that the pervasive deployment of multi-tier 5G-supported Mobile-Fog-Cloudtechnological computing platforms will constitute an effective means to support the real-time execution of future Internet applications by resource- and energy-limited mobile devices. Increasing interest in this emerging networking-computing technology demands the optimization and performance evaluation of several parts of the underlying infrastructures. However, field trials are challenging due to their operational costs, and in every case, the obtained results could be difficult to repeat and customize. These emergingMobile-Fog-Cloud ecosystems still lack, indeed, customizable software tools for the performance simulation of their computing-networking building blocks. Motivated by these considerations, in this contribution, we present VirtFogSim. It is aMATLAB-supported software toolbox that allows the dynamic joint optimization and tracking of the energy and delay performance of Mobile-Fog-Cloud systems for the execution of applications described by general Directed Application Graphs (DAGs). In a nutshell, the main peculiar features of the proposed VirtFogSim toolbox are that: (i) it allows the joint dynamic energy-aware optimization of the placement of the application tasks and the allocation of the needed computing-networking resources under hard constraints on acceptable overall execution times, (ii) it allows the repeatable and customizable simulation of the resulting energy-delay performance of the overall system; (iii) it allows the dynamic tracking of the performed resource allocation under time-varying operational environments, as those typically featuring mobile applications; (iv) it is equipped with a user-friendly Graphic User Interface (GUI) that supports a number of graphic formats for data rendering, and (v) itsMATLAB code is optimized for running atop multi-core parallel execution platforms. To check both the actual optimization and scalability capabilities of the VirtFogSim toolbox, a number of experimental setups featuring different use cases and operational environments are simulated, and their performances are compared
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