The main result of this letter is that SOC naturally arises as a result of memory effects. We show that memory effects provide the mechanism for self organization. A general procedure to investigate this issue in models that display self organized critical behaviour is proposed and applied to some example. The simplest class of models exhibiting self organized criticality through this mechanism...

The aim of this paper is to provide a sound framework for addressing a difficult problem: the automatic construction of an autonomous agent's modular architecture. We combine results from two apparently uncorrelated domains: Autonomous planning through Markov Decision Processes and a General Data Clustering Approach using a kernel-like method. Our fundamental idea is that the former is a good f...

Living cells need to impose inner order, transport organelles from site to site inside the cell, withstand external pressures and propagate themselves to different locations. All of these mechanical needs are supplied by the cells cytoskeleton. One of the components of the cytoskeleton is filamentous actin (F-actin). The two ends of F-actin are distinctly different, making it a polar rod with a...

Recent work by Becker and Hinton (Becker and Hinton, 1992) shows a promising mechanism, based on maximizing mutual information assuming spatial coherence, by which a system can selforganize itself to learn visual abilities such as binocular stereo. We introduce a more general criterion, based on Bayesian probability theory, and thereby demonstrate a connection to Bayesian theories of visual per...

" …whatever is born or done at this particular moment of time has the quality of this moment of time. Abstract Do things change in time, or does time change things? We explore the consequences of a theory that time—given a physical interpretation independent of space—drives system change globally, identical to the way in which information drives subsystem change, locally. We conjecture that Gre...

In this paper, I analyze the organization of tasks or activities by a collection of agents. I begin by formally defining organized collections and robustly organized collections of agents in the context of a simple model. Within this framework, I demonstrate that organized collections and robustly organized collections exist and equilibria need not be organized. I then test whether adaptive age...

We present computational and analytical results indicating that systems of driven entities with repulsive interactions tend to reach an optimal state associated with minimal interaction and minimal dissipation. Using concepts from non-equilibrium thermodynamics and game theoretical ideas, we generalize this finding to an even wider class of selforganizing systems which have the ability to reach...

How do we manage to understand a completely novel state of affairs, such as the sudden effects of an unexpected earthquake, or the arrival of a total stranger instead of the sister we were waiting for? In each case, for a moment we might be stunned, but we are able quite quickly to fit these events into our overall framework for understanding the world. However, terrified and despairing we feel...

A minority game whose strategies are given by probabilities p, is replaced by a 'simplified' version that makes no use of memories at all. Numerical results show that the corresponding distribution functions are indistinguishable. A related approach, using a random walk formulation, allows us to identify the origin of correlations and self organization in the model, and to understand their disa...