An Infection-Based Mechanism for Self-Adaptation in Multi-Agent Complex Networks

Distributed mechanisms that regulate the behavior of autonomous agents in open multi-agent systems (MAS) are of high interest since we cannot employ centralized approaches relying on global knowledge. In actual-world societies, the balance between personal and social interests is self-regulated through social conventions that emerge in a decentralized manner. As such, a computational mechanism that allows to engineer the emergence of social conventions in MAS can become a highly promising tool to endow open MAS with self-regulating capabilities. To this end we propose a computational self-adapting mechanism that facilitates agents to distributively evolve their social behavior to reach the best social conventions. Our approach borrows from the social contagion phenomenon: social conventions are akin to infectious diseases that spread themselves through members of the society. Furthermore, we experimentally show that our mechanism helps a MAS to regulate itself by searching and establishing (better) social conventions on a wide range of interaction topologies and dynamic environments.

Measuring the evolution of contemporary Western popular music

Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners' attention for ages. Many of the structural regularities underlying musical discourse are yet to be discovered and, accordingly, their historical evolution remains formally unknown. Here we unveil a number of patterns and metrics characterizing the generic usage of primary musical facets such as pitch, timbre, and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for a period of more than fifty years. However, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of pitch transitions, the homogenization of the timbral palette, and the growing loudness levels. This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted on these changing characteristics. Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation, and increased the average loudness

Measuring the evolution of contemporary western popular music

Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners' attention for ages. Many of the structural regularities underlying musical discourse are yet to be discovered and, accordingly, their historical evolution remains formally unknown. Here we unveil a number of patterns and metrics characterizing the generic usage of primary musical facets such as pitch, timbre, and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for a period of more than fifty years. However, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of pitch transitions, the homogenization of the timbral palette, and the growing loudness levels. This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted on these changing characteristics. Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation, and increased the average loudness