CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online.

Self-Organization of Mobile Populations in Cyclic Competition Export

(11 Jan 2008)

Citation Format

[Posts]

View FullText article


Koh's tags for this article

self-organization

X Reviews [Write a review of this article]

X Find related articles from these CiteULike users

X Find related articles with these CiteULike tags

X Posting History

X Abstract

The formation of out-of-equilibrium patterns is a characteristic feature of spatially-extended, biodiverse, ecological systems. Intriguing examples are provided by cyclic competition of species, as metaphorically described by the `rock-paper-scissors' game. Both experimentally and theoretically, such non-transitive interactions have been found to induce self-organization of static individuals into noisy, irregular clusters. However, a profound understanding and characterization of such patterns is still lacking. Here, we theoretically investigate the influence of individuals' mobility on the spatial structures emerging in rock-paper-scissors games. We devise a quantitative approach to analyze the spatial patterns self-forming in the course of the stochastic time evolution. For a paradigmatic model originally introduced by May and Leonard, within an interacting particle approach, we demonstrate that the system's behavior - in the proper continuum limit - is aptly captured by a set of stochastic partial differential equations. The system's stochastic dynamics is shown to lead to the emergence of entangled rotating spiral waves. While the spirals' wavelength and spreading velocity is demonstrated to be accurately predicted by a (deterministic) complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, their entanglement results from the inherent stochastic nature of the system. These findings and our methods have important applications for understanding the formation of noisy patterns, e.g., in ecological and evolutionary contexts, and are also of relevance for the kinetics of (bio)-chemical reactions.


X BibTeX record

X RIS record


Privacy Statement | Terms & Conditions
CiteULike organises scholarly (or academic) papers or literature and provides bibliographic (which means it makes bibliographies) for universities and higher education establishments. It helps undergraduates and postgraduates. People studying for PhDs or in postdoctoral (postdoc) positions. The service is similar in scope to EndNote or RefWorks or any other reference manager like BibTeX, but it is a social bookmarking service for scientists and humanities researchers.