arXiv subjects

Chris Kempes

Publications and source records attributed to Chris Kempes.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Three Centuries of the Laws of Cricket Reveal Core Principles of the Evolution of Regulatory Mechanisms

Rules, regulations, and regulatory systems are central to societies, institutions, and organisms, yet surprisingly little is known about their evolution over long timescales. The Laws of Cricket, the world's second most popular sport, offer a unique insight into this fundamental question. Their 268-year history constitutes the longest continuous rule-set record yet assembled. Our quantitative analysis reveals generic features including rule-book size growing exponentially in time but scaling sublinearly with matches played; new situations stimulate new rules, but at a decelerating rate; regulatory structures exhibit abrupt phase transitions, increasing rule specificity, interconnectivity and complexity with central rules shifting from gameplay to officiating. These provide a framework for understanding how governance evolves from simple collections of rules to complex regulatory architectures across social, legal, and biological domains.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

A generative model of function growth explains hidden self-similarities across biological and social systems

From genomes and ecosystems to bureaucracies and cities, the growth of complex systems occurs by adding new types of functions and expanding existing ones. We present a simple generative model that generalizes the Yule-Simon process by including: (i) a size-dependent probability of introducing new functions, and (ii) a generalized preferential attachment mechanism for expanding existing ones. We uncover a shared underlying structure that helps explain how function diversity evolves in empirical observations, such as prokaryotic proteomes, U.S. federal agencies, and urban economies. We show that real systems are often best represented as having non-Zipfian rank-frequency distributions, driven by sublinear preferential attachment, whilst still maintaining power-law scaling in their abundance distributions. Furthermore, our analytics explain five distinct phases of the organization of functional elements across complex systems. The model integrates empirical findings regarding the logarithmic growth of diversity in cities and the self-similarity of their rank-frequency distributions. Self-similarity previously observed in the rank-frequency distributions of cities is not observed in cells and federal agencies -- however, under a rescaling relative to the total diversity, all systems admit self-similar structures predicted by our theory.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

A Century of Evolution in the Complexity of the United States Legal Code

As societies confront increasingly complex regulatory demands in domains such as digital governance, climate policy, and public health, there is a pressing need to understand how legal systems evolve, where they concentrate regulatory attention, and how their institutional architectures shape capacity for adaptation. Yet, the long-term structural dynamics of law remain empirically underexplored. Here, we provide a versioned, machine-readable record of the United States Code (U.S. Code), the primary compilation of federal statutory law in the United States, covering the entire history of the Code from 1926 to 2023. We include not only the curated text in Code but also its structural and linguistic complexity: word counts, vocabulary statistics, hierarchical organization (titles, chapters, sections, subsections), and cross-references among titles. In this way, the dataset offers an empirical foundation for large-scale and long-term interdisciplinary analysis of the growth, reorganization, and internal logic of statutory systems. The dataset is released on GitHub with comprehensive documentation to support reuse across legal studies, data science, complexity research, and institutional analysis.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

What makes Individual I's a Collective We; Coordination mechanisms & costs

The collective effort exceeds the sum of its parts when individuals coordinate and regulate their activities and behaviors. This holds true even in self-organizing systems with open, voluntary participation where coordination occurs implicitly. Here, we analyze the non-functional actions of contributors, administrators, and bots on Wikipedia, categorizing them by their asymmetric authority: one-way oversight and two-way. This categorization helps us reveal comparable patterns. First, we find remarkably consistent scaling factors for each category relative to system size. Two-way coordination scales superlinearly (with an exponent of $1.3$), while oversight coordination grows sublinearly (with an exponent of $0.9$), suggesting an underlying mechanism for coordination across communities. Second, we identify the hierarchical modular structure of interactions as a key factor for the economy of scale in coordination, and we propose a mathematical model to explain these results. Finally, our temporal analysis shows a shift from two-way interactions to one-way oversight as system size increases. This suggests the emergence of a nascent hierarchical structure even in self-organizing systems, echoing Weber's theory of organizational evolution.

physics.soc-ph↗