Noise-induced emergent hierarchies in a CA model

Abstract

This paper introduces the notion of noise-induced emergent hierarchies and analyses the influence of the topology of the underlying network on these hierarchies. By developing upon a previous model of cell differentiation based on noisy random Boolean networks, we show that the adoption of a regular topology such that of cellular automata can lead to interesting effects, the most remarkable one being that, ceteris paribus, the resulting hierarchies have a larger number of levels and could therefore describe more structured complex systems. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.