Emergent phenomena in equilibrium and nonequilibrium collectives

Programmable matter explores how collections of computationally limited agents acting locally and asynchronously can achieve useful coordinated behaviors. We take a stochastic approach for programming collectives using techniques from randomized algorithms and equilibrium statistical physics to develop rigorous distributed algorithms that give guarantees and are robust to failures. We will also introduce new tools that have proven fruitful for modeling biological and physical collectives in nonequilibrium settings based on the notion of rattling.