Engineering Commons^™

Emergent Criticality Through Adaptive Information Processing In Boolean Networks, Alireza Goudarzi, Christof Teuscher, Natali Gulbahce, Thimo Rohlf

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

We study information processing in populations of Boolean networks with evolving connectivity and systematically explore the interplay between the learning capability, robustness, the network topology, and the task complexity. We solve a long-standing open question and find computationally that, for large system sizes N, adaptive information processing drives the networks to a critical connectivity K_{c}=2. For finite size networks, the connectivity approaches the critical value with a power law of the system size N. We show that network learning and generalization are optimized near criticality, given that the task complexity and the amount of information provided surpass threshold values. Both …