The subculture of humorous images is a pervasive phenomenon on the Internet. Some social media websites (e.g. 9GAG1, Reddit and 4chan) provide platforms for people to share their images and comments. These websites are often occupied by experienced users, and most of the newcomers have trouble fitting in such communities. Among all the types of humorous images, Internet memes are relatively har...

This research employed systems social science inquiry to build a synthesis model that would be useful for modeling meme evolution. First, a formal definition of memes was proposed that balanced both ontological adequacy and empirical observability. Based on this definition, a systems model for meme evolution was synthesized from Shannon Information Theory and elements of Bandura's Social Cognit...

Conspiracy theories, or in general seriously distorted beliefs, are widespread. How and why are they formed in the brain is still more a matter of speculation rather than science. In this paper one plausible mechanisms is investigated: rapid freezing of high neuroplasticity (RFHN). Emotional arousal increases neuroplasticity and leads to creation of new pathways spreading neural activation. Usi...

The spreading of memes on the web played an important role in the emergence of Internet communities. The principal purpose of the study is to implement a simulation model to analyze the process of emergence of Internet communities. The model shows the importance of factors such as the interactions between online agents as well as their propensity to adopt and remember new memes. In addition, it...

Multimemetic algorithms (MMAs) are memetic algorithms that explicitly exploit the evolution of memes, i.e., non-genetic expressions of problem-solving strategies. We consider a class of MMAs in which these memes are rewriting rules whose length can be fixed during the run of the algorithm or self-adapt during the search process. We analyze this self-adaptation in the context of spatially-struct...

How does network structure affect diffusion? Recent studies suggest that the answer depends on the type of contagion. Complex contagions, unlike infectious diseases (simple contagions), are affected by social reinforcement and homophily. Hence, the spread within highly clustered communities is enhanced, while diffusion across communities is hampered. A common hypothesis is that memes and behavi...

The challenge of predicting meme success has gained attention from researchers, largely due to the increased availability of social media data. Many models focus on structural features of online social networks as predictors of meme success. The current work takes a different approach, predicting meme success from linguistic features. We propose predictive power is gained by grounding memes in ...

In this paper we present an artificial intelligence system inspired by Richard Dawkin's theory of memes for the composition of rhythmic passages. Rhythmic composition is understood as the process of interconnecting sequences of basic elements (or "rhythmic memes"). The overall design of the system consists of two broad stages: the learning stage and the production stage. In the learning stage, ...

Based on the question “How can people and computers be connected so that – collectively – they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?” we propose an evolutionary approach. From this point of view, there are of course fundamental differences between man and machine. Where one is artificial, the other is natural, and where the computer needs to pr...