In our day-to-day lives, we all interact with many systems where the structure of the system changes based on external or internal factors. Each of our bodies is an immense network of cells, human and bacterial, in constant dialogue with internal and external factors, sometimes dying, mutating, or being created. On a grander scale, an ecological system involves many actors — the flora and fauna, the climate, the geology, ect. — and the interlinking web of relations changes, slowly, over time, as new species evolve, the climate drifts, and extant species compete for survival. In a prediction market, the reputations of involved guess-makers change and update over time based on the success or failure of their guesses. When optimizing an artificial neural network using gradient descent, the weights and biases involved are constantly being updated based on the training data.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://topos.site/blog/2024-01-09-building-dynamic-structures/