My book with @scotton
on Braitenberg Vehicles was published today 🥳. The result of thousands of backyard meetings and zoom calls, the book confirms what I'll call Braitenberg's dictum: even the simplest systems contain great wealths of complexity.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548199/the-open-dynamics-of-braitenberg-vehicles/

We really labored to work out all the bifurcations and dynamical regimes (though we did not get them all), and to explain them in as clear and visually rich a manner as possible. The book also contains an accessible but rigorous overview of dynamical systems theory.

The centerpiece of the book is the analysis of pairs of vehicles. Here is the central bifurcation diagram. The "cheese wheel" is a 3d subspace of the 4d weight space, and the panels correspond to ways the vehicles behave when the weights are in different regimes.

Meanders with arbitrarily many petals are possible in the rose-colored regions, which is one of the more beautiful results.

The systems can be used to describe animal behaviors, chemical reactions, themes in conservative and dissipative dynamics, and much more. Even with all that, the system contains further multitudes, and that's all just for a pair of simple agents! Braitenberg's dictum prevails.

There is also a discussion of the philosophical implications of the work (a pluralist approach to representations and embodied cognitive science), which I'll post about separately soon!