Recent Advances in Guided Self-Organization

Dear Colleagues,

Examples of self-organising systems can be found practically everywhere: a heated fluid forms regular convection patterns of Bénard cells, neuronal ensembles self-organise into complex spike patterns, a swarm changes its shape in response to an approaching predator, ecosystems develop spatial structures in order to deal with diminishing resources, and so on.

Typically, self-organisation (SO) is defined as the evolution of a system into an organised form in the absence of external pressures. SO within a system brings about several attractive properties, in particular robustness, adaptability, and scalability. Consequently, a natural question to ask would be: Is it possible to guide the process of self-organisation towards some desirable patterns and outcomes? Over the last decades, it has become apparent that this question can be rigorously formalised across multiple domains, leading to the emergence of a new research field: Guided Self-Organisation (GSO). This has led to theoretical developments in information theory, network theory, dynamical systems, game theory, systems biology, and sociophysics, as well as practical applications in artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, unconventional computation, distributed robotics, and active matter.

The main challenge faced by designers of self-organising systems is how to achieve and control the desired dynamics. Erring on one side may result in over-engineering the system, completely eliminating emergent patterns and suppressing an increase in internal organisation with outside influence. Strongly favouring the other side may leave too much non-determinism in the system’s behaviour, making its verification and validation almost impossible.

The 10th International Conference on Guided Self-Organisation (12-13 December 2022, Auckland, New Zealand), GSO-2022, will bring together invited experts and researchers in artificial life, self-organising systems, and complex adaptive systems, with particular emphasis on critical phenomena and emergent behaviour. Special topics of interest include the origin of life, systems biology, physics of life, unconventional computation, swarm intelligence, measures of complexity, criticality, complex networks, and information-driven self-organization (IDSO).

We invite papers to this Special Issue in Entropy from both attendees of GSO-2022 and others who are interested in this field but may not have had the opportunity to attend the conference.

Dr. Michael Harré
Prof. Dr. Mikhail Prokopenko
Guest Editors

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