Connor McShaffrey - Indiana University, USA
Biography
Title: Foundations of Viability Space
Abstract: As a general principle, a precondition for all goals is survival, at least until the point that said goals have been achieved. To accomplish this, organisms must metabolically and behaviorally achieve dynamics to balance their state within a complex set of physiological constraints. The question of how organisms do this falls under the study of viability, and, respectively, the physiological limits that distinguish life from death are known as viability constraints. Although it is common to see agent dynamics being modeled in tandem with viability constraints within computational biology, personalized medicine, and Artificial Life, analyzing these systems has remained an open challenge. In this talk, we demonstrate the method of Viability Space Decomposition, which allows us to partition an agent’s state space into regions that will maintain viable dynamics and regions that result in death on a finite time horizon. We first demonstrate this by analyzing a simple protocell model in a fixed environment. Then, we allow the protocell to navigate its environment according to its metabolic needs and show how the method can still be applied to this more complex case. We finish by pointing out some other essential details regarding viability at large, such as how interacting agents influence each other’s survival outcomes and how viability constraints emerge in the first place.