Plenary Talk

How Structure Creates Force

November 23, 9:00-11:00 Am, Central Time 

Dimitri Volchenkov

Associate Professor
Department of Mathematics and Statistics,
Texas Tech University, USA

Abstract: In the proposed lecture, we discuss how structure determining the ability to move fosters entropic pressure on particles/travelers. Entropic forces are the emergent phenomena resulting from the entire system’s statistical tendency to increase its entropy. Alex Wissner-Gross and Cameron Freer recently proposed “a causal generalization of entropic forces” that they showed can induce certain patterns of behavior with some very striking characteristics. One would not guess those outcomes by looking purely at the constraint that produces them. Underlying this set of intriguing behaviors is simply the computational capability to integrate over all possible futures to maximize the rate of entropy production over an entire trajectory. The observed behavior bear striking resemblance with examples we have seen in Swarm Intelligence (e.g., ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling), Communities, and in Urban studies. The process of sampling alternative paths and behaviors reveals essential features of quantum mechanics, one of which is the inclination of electrons to “explore all paths” that can be viewed as part of a search process, bounded in space by maximal causal entropy and in time by minimum coordination latency.