In mathematics and computation theory there are a class of cellular automatons which are known as elementary automatons. This class of cellular automatons is restricted to the one dimensional grid (in the figures below the second dimension, ordinate (vertical) axis, is time) with cells either on or off. Another important simplification is that the actual state of the cell at given time, \( x_{i,t} \), depends only on the previous state of the same cell and the previous states of its immediate neighbors, i.e., on \( \{x_{i-1,t-1},x_{i,t-1},x_{i+1,t-1}\} \). Due to these restrictions and simplifications, generally speaking cellular automatons might evolve in the infinite dimensions, have infinite neighborhoods and have limitless number of possible cell states, these cellular automatons appear to be very simple, though as we show below they can replicate very complex and even chaotic behavior.

Last week, on 26th and 27th of January, Lithuanian Society of Young Researchers held a conference "Interdisciplinarity: How to Make it Work". During the conference presenters, which included both scientists and officers of varying institutions, from all over the world and Lithuania have shared with the attendees their success stories and provided ideological grounds for the discussions on the interdisciplinarity.

For me the most important part was the aforementioned ideological background. Working in the context of Physics of Risk it is important for us to see where do we actually stand. Are we still in physics or maybe we have moved to the other domains (e.g., economics, financial mathematics or maybe even into the brand new independent field econophysics?). So in this text I will attempt to share and develop some interesting thoughts heard during the conference.

The convergence of economies is an interesting topic to countries, which are significantly behind the leading countries in terms of economic efficiency and standard of living. It should not be a great surprise that the politicians of such developing countries name the economical catch up as their primary political goal. Understanding the essence of political debates on this topic and their interpretation i the media is very challenging topic as economic globalization, or integration, is very complex process. Though the basic understanding of what is known to economists about the economic convergence might be obtained by checking freely available source such as Wikipedia.

Our interest in this topic stems from the widely seen and heard, even among specialists (economists scientists, financial analytics and journalists), misunderstanding of the mechanics behind the observed economical convergence. These some times even principal errors causes society-wide mistrust in countries economical evolution and economical perspectives. We would like to illustrate known laws using certain examples and briefly analyze economic convergence of our region. We hope that interactive tools provided in the text will enable You to experiment with data and find the answers to your questions.

Full text is (was?) available on V. Gontis home page »

In the next Physica A issue (will be made available in February, 2012) our article [1] will be published. The article is on the agent-based reasoning for the stochastic models. Basically this article incorporates knowledge obtained while working on the simple models provided on Physics of Risk:

In the past few year European econophysicists shared a rumors on the upcoming flagship project, which should innovate not only econophysics, but also economic and other social sciences. Finally it has started and Lithuanian scientists have joined it! We, scientists of VU ITPA, are also among them.

More information can be found on the official project home page futurict.eu.