From description to design: Automated engineering of complex systems with desirable emergent properties

TL;DR

This paper introduces an optimization pipeline that automates the engineering of complex systems to exhibit desired emergent properties by transforming descriptive statistics into loss functions and using gradient descent.

Contribution

It presents a novel method to design micro-scale features in complex systems to achieve specific macro-scale emergent behaviors, advancing from descriptive science to engineering.

Findings

Successfully engineered systems with higher-order synergistic information

Produced systems exhibiting multi-attractor metastability

Accounted for system constraints like connection costs

Abstract

The study of complex systems has produced a huge library of different descriptive statistics that scientists can use to describe the various emergent patterns that characterize complex systems. The problem of engineering systems to display those patterns from first principles is a much harder one, however, as a hallmark of complexity is that macro-scale emergent properties are often difficult to predict from micro-scale features. Here, we propose a general optimization-based pipeline to automate the difficult problem of engineering emergent features by re-purposing descriptive statistics as loss functions, and letting a gradient descent optimizer do the hard work of designing the relevant micro-scale features and interactions. Using Kuramoto systems of coupled oscillators as a test bed, we show that our approach can reliably produce systems with non-trivial global properties, including higher-order synergistic information, multi-attractor metastability, and meso-scale structures such as modules and integrated information. We further show that this pipeline can also account for and accommodate constraints on the system properties, such as the costs of connections, or topological restrictions. This work is a step forward on the path moving complex systems science from a field predicated largely on description and post-hoc storytelling towards one capable of engineering real-world systems with desirable emergent meso-scale and macro-scale properties.