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Detecting emergent processes in cellular automata with excess information
Many natural processes occur over characteristic spatial and temporal scales. This paper presents tools for (i) flexibly and scalably coarse-graining cellular automata and (ii) identifying which coarse-grainings express an automaton’s dynamics well, and which express its dynamics badly. We apply the tools to investigate a range of examples in Conway’s Game of Life and Hopfield networks and demonstrate that they capture some basic intuitions about emergent processes. Finally, we formalize the notion that a process is emergent if it is better expressed at a coarser granularity.
@inproceedings{Balduzzi2011, title = {Detecting emergent processes in cellular automata with excess information}, booktitle = {Advances in Artificial Life: ECAL 2011}, abstract = {Many natural processes occur over characteristic spatial and temporal scales. This paper presents tools for (i) flexibly and scalably coarse-graining cellular automata and (ii) identifying which coarse-grainings express an automaton’s dynamics well, and which express its dynamics badly. We apply the tools to investigate a range of examples in Conway’s Game of Life and Hopfield networks and demonstrate that they capture some basic intuitions about emergent processes. Finally, we formalize the notion that a process is emergent if it is better expressed at a coarser granularity.}, pages = {55-62}, editors = {Lenaerts, T. , M. Giacobini, H. Bersini, P. Bourgine, M. Dorigo, R. Doursat}, publisher = {MIT Press}, address = {Cambridge, MA, USA}, month = aug, year = {2011}, slug = {balduzzi2011}, author = {Balduzzi, D.}, month_numeric = {8} }
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