It's complicated: Self-organized patterns identify emergent behavior near critical transitions
From the perspective of complex systems, a range of events – from chemistry and biology to extreme weather and population ecology – can be viewed as large-scale self-emergent phenomena that occur as a consequence of deteriorating stability. Based on observing the self-organized patterns associated with these phenomena, the elusive goal has been the ability to interpret these emergent patterns to predict the related critical events. Recently, scientists at HRL Laboratories, LLC in Malibu, California sought to determine if there was a quantifiable relationship between these patterns and the network of interactions characterizing the event. By limiting their working definition of self-organization to spontaneous order emergence resulting from a non-equilibrium phase transition (that is, a change in a feature of a physical system – one that is not simply isolated from the rest of the universe –that results in a discrete transition of that system to another state), the researchers were...