The Statue in the Stone: How Dynamical Systems Discover Environmental Patterns

Explore a seminar on how complex dynamical systems discover and adapt to patterns in their environment. Delve into the mechanism of damped systems driven by external forces with varying degrees of correlation. Learn how uncorrelated driving environments act like a hot thermal bath, while patterned environments allow systems to find configurations that match their dynamics to drive patterns. Understand how these "environment-matched" configurations are favored in steady-state due to their stability. Examine several toy models illustrating this theoretical framework and discover its application to a swarm-robotics experiment. Gain insights into how the emergence and control of self-organized dynamics can serve as a powerful design paradigm for collaborative swarm behavior.