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Many complex systems, from microbial communities to mussel beds to drylands, display striking self-organized clusters. According to theoretical models, these groupings play an important role in how an ecosystem works and its ability to respond to environmental changes. A new paper in PNAS focused on the spatial patterns found in drylands offers important empirical evidence validating the models.

Waste is a natural by-product of productive human economies and a problem that plagues human systems. In a new paper, Mingzhen Lu and Chris Kempes explore how three types of waste production — municipal solid waste, wastewater, and greenhouse gas emissions — scale with city size. 

In 2005, three researchers at SFI put forward a model, now known as the LMF Model, explaining a "long-memory" behavior in stock markets around the world. Last November, their model was finally confirmed.

The rules of statistical physics address the uncertainty about the state of a system that arises when that system interacts with its environment. But they’ve long missed another kind. In a new paper published in Physical Review Research, David Wolpert and Jan Korbel argue that uncertainty in the thermodynamic parameters themselves — built into equations that govern the energetic behavior of the system — may also influence the outcome of an experiment.

As consumer interest in electric vehicles rises, the lack of charging stations is a continuing concern to potential customers. A recent paper in PNAS Nexus provides a possible road map for how to optimize the locations for new EV infrastructure.

Societies and political structures, like the humans they serve, appear to become more fragile as they age, according to an analysis of hundreds of pre-modern societies. A new study, which holds implications for the modern world, provides the first quantitative support for the theory that the resilience of political states decreases over time. 

Researchers, including former SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Elizabeth Hobson, have introduced a novel mate choice concept called 'Inferred Attractiveness,' outlined in a recent publication in PLOS Biology. 

As children, we learn categories through visual examples, verbal explanations, or both, and are often guided by “teachers” — perhaps a parent or other adult. In contrast, academic research has primarily studied non-pedagogical learning where there is no active teacher, and learning based on visual examples, omitting verbal-based category learning. A recent paper in Cognition by Arseny Moskvichev and co-authors aims to close this gap.

In the last two decades, researchers have reported success modeling high-dimensional chaotic behaviors with a simple but powerful machine-learning approach called reservoir computing. A new paper in Physical Review Research identifies limitations to reservoir computing and suggests a kind of catch-22 that can prove hard to circumvent, especially for complicated dynamic systems. 

The field of artificial intelligence has long been stymied by the lack of an answer to its most fundamental question: What is intelligence? To address questions about intelligence in AI, we need concrete tasks to pin down and test the notion of intelligence, argue SFI researchers Arseny Moskvichev, Melanie Mitchell, and Victor Vikram Odouard in a new paper in Transactions on Machine Learning Research.

In a new study published in PNAS, External Professor and UC Davis professor emeritus Alan Hastings and colleagues analyzed a case of social contagion in Adouin's gulls in Spain.

SFI's David Wolpert's No-free-lunch theorems have stirred up many opinions over the past few decades. Wolpert chimes in on the conversation in a new piece in the Journal for General Philosophy of Science.

A new study in Science Advances proposes a model for examining the interplay of epidemiology and economics that could give policymakers guidelines when we face novel outbreaks in the future.

In a paper in Scientific Reports, former SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Gizem Bacaksizlar Turbic and SFI Professor Mirta Galesic tested compared the network structure of comments in four publications with varying political persuasions to test theories about the potential influence of a small group of voices. 

ChatGPT knows how to use the word “tickle” in a sentence but it cannot feel the sensation. Can it then be said to understand the meaning of the word tickle the same way we humans do? In a paper for PNAS, SFI researchers Melanie Mitchell and David C. Krakauer survey the ongoing debate in which AI researchers are teasing apart whether Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Google’s PaLM understand language in any humanlike sense.

In the last 50 years, economic theory has come to be based almost solely on mathematics. This brings logical precision, but according to a new paper by SFI economist Brian Arthur, it restricts what economics can easily talk about.

Does a diversity of species protect ecological communities from invasion? Recent work by SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner takes up this long-standing question for complexity science, at a microscopic scale.

In November, Brian Enquist, Mary O’Connor, and Chris Kempes organized a workshop to take stock of advances in biological scaling theory since the publication of a seminal book for the field.

For at least 200,000 years, humans have been trying to understand their environments and adapt to them. At times, we have succeeded; often, we have not. In a new study, SFI's Stefani Crabtree, Jennifer Dunne, and others analyze how information flows from ecosystems to the societies inhabiting them.

Two recent papers by CU Boulder and SFI co-authors explore the socioeconomic makeup and the educational backgrounds of tenure-track faculty across the U.S.