then makes analogies with neurons and introduces non-linearity, before concluding:According to a computational study conducted by a group of physicists at Washington University in St. Louis, one may create order by introducing disorder.
While working on their model – a network of interconnected pendulums, or "oscillators" – the researchers noticed that when driven by ordered forces the various pendulums behaved chaotically and swung out of sync like a group of intoxicated synchronized swimmers. This was unexpected – shouldn't synchronized forces yield synchronized pendulums?
But then came the real surprise: When they introduced disorder – forces were applied at random to each oscillator – the system became ordered and synchronized.
I was about to post a comment there until I failed to find how to link my somewhat cryptic response back to the PhysOrg report, so, as it is relevant to the problem of resilience which is so often neglected here too, I retreated to more familar territory to post my comment:"This is of course basic research," said Brandt. "But what you can learn from this is that complex systems... sometimes behave in a very unexpected way, completely opposite to your intuition or expectation. … It will be interesting to see if the mechanism that we have found can actually be put to some use."
Such reductionism aside, the issue of how to achieve resilience in our simple systems really ought to be getting a lot more attention here.Throw a rock in a pond
I suspect we are all so familiar with ordered response to disordered stimuli that we had stopped noticing.
The key point is that the disturbed system needs to exhibit sufficient resilience.
And while resilience abounds in the richness of the natural world, it is extremely costly to simulate in computers, even moreso in our favourite toy systems like cellular automata.
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