In Search of Self-Organization

Many who study complex systems believe that the complexity we observe in the world around us is frequently the product of a large number of interactions between components following a simple rule. However, the task of discerning the rule governing the evolution of any given system is often quite difficult, requiring intuition, guesswork, and a great deal of expertise in that domain. To circumvent this issue, researchers have considered the inverse problem where one searches among many candidate rules to reveal those producing interesting behavior. This approach has its own challenges because the search space grows exponentially and interesting behavior is rare and difficult to rigorously define. Therefore, the contribution of this work includes tools and techniques for searching for dimer automaton rules that exhibit self-organization (the transformation of disorder into structure in the absence of centralized control). Dimer automata are simple, discrete, asynchronous rewriting systems that operate over the edges of an arbitrary graph. Specifically, these contributions include a number of novel, surprising, and useful applications of dimer automata, practical methods for measuring self-organization, advanced techniques for searching for dimer automaton rules, and two efficient GPU parallelizations of dimer automata to make searching and simulation more tractable.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science and Applications

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science and Applications

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Arendt, Dustin Lockhart

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Cao, Yang

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Arthur, James D.
• Ramakrishnan, Naren
• Paul, Mark R.
• Ribbens, Calvin J.

• Dimer Automata
• Self-Organization
• GPGPU
• Complex Systems

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-03202012-143226

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/26465