Number and length of attractors in a critical Kauffman model with connectivity one

Despite their apparent simplicity, random Boolean networks display a rich variety of dynamical behaviors. Much work has been focused on the properties and abundance of attractors. The topologies of random Boolean networks with one input per node can be seen as graphs of random maps. We introduce an approach to investigating random maps and finding analytical results for attractors in random Boolean networks with the corresponding topology. Approximating some other non-chaotic...

A model of cellular metabolism due to S. Kauffman is analyzed. It consists of a network of Boolean gates randomly assembled according to a probability distribution. It is shown that the behavior of the network depends very critically on certain simple algebraic parameters of the distribution. In some cases, the analytic results support conclusions based on simulations of random Boolean networks, but in other cases, they do not.

A variant of Kauffman's model of cellular metabolism is presented. It is a randomly generated network of boolean gates, identical to Kauffman's except for a small bias in favor of boolean gates that depend on at most one input. The bias is asymptotic to 0 as the number of gates increases. Upper bounds on the time until the network reaches a state cycle and the size of the state cycle, as functions of the number of gates $n$, are derived. If the bias approaches 0 slowly enough...

We investigate Threshold Random Boolean Networks with $K = 2$ inputs per node, which are equivalent to Kauffman networks, with only part of the canalyzing functions as update functions. According to the simplest consideration these networks should be critical but it turns out that they show a rich variety of behaviors, including periodic and chaotic oscillations. The results are supported by analytical calculations and computer simulations.

Random Boolean networks, the Kauffman model, are revisited by means of a novel decimation algorithm, which reduces the networks to their dynamical cores. The average size of the removed part, the stable core, grows approximately linearly with N, the number of nodes in the original networks. We show that this can be understood as the percolation of the stability signal in the network. The stability of the dynamical core is investigated and it is shown that this core lacks the ...

We study the properties of the distance between attractors in Random Boolean Networks, a prominent model of genetic regulatory networks. We define three distance measures, upon which attractor distance matrices are constructed and their main statistic parameters are computed. The experimental analysis shows that ordered networks have a very clustered set of attractors, while chaotic networks' attractors are scattered; critical networks show, instead, a pattern with characteri...

Boolean networks have been the object of much attention, especially since S. Kauffman proposed them in the 1960's as models for gene regulatory networks. These systems are characterized by being defined on a Boolean state space and by simultaneous updating at discrete time steps. Of particular importance for biological applications are networks in which the indegree for each variable is bounded by a fixed constant, as was stressed by Kauffman in his original papers. An impo...

We investigate analytically and numerically the dynamical properties of critical Boolean networks with power-law in-degree distributions. When the exponent of the in-degree distribution is larger than 3, we obtain results equivalent to those obtained for networks with fixed in-degree, e.g., the number of the non-frozen nodes scales as $N^{2/3}$ with the system size $N$. When the exponent of the distribution is between 2 and 3, the number of the non-frozen nodes increases as $...

Boolean networks at the critical point have been a matter of debate for many years as, e.g., scaling of number of attractor with system size. Recently it was found that this number scales superpolynomially with system size, contrary to a common earlier expectation of sublinear scaling. We here point to the fact that these results are obtained using deterministic parallel update, where a large fraction of attractors in fact are an artifact of the updating scheme. This limits t...

We consider a model recently proposed by Chatterjee and Durrett [CD2011] as an "annealed approximation" of boolean networks, which are a class of cellular automata on a random graph, as defined by S. Kauffman [K69]. The starting point is a random directed graph on $n$ vertices; each vertex has $r$ input vertices pointing to it. For the model of [CD2011], a discrete time threshold contact process is then considered on this graph: at each instant, each vertex has probability $q...