Collective behavior is widely regarded as a hallmark property of living and intelligent systems. Yet, many examples are known of simple physical systems that are not alive, which nonetheless display collective behavior too, prompting simple physical models to often be adopted to explain living collective behaviors. To understand collective behavior as it occurs in living examples, it is important to determine whether or not there exist fundamental differences in how non-living and living systems act collectively, as well as the limits of the intuition that can be built from simpler, physical examples in explaining biological phenomenon. Here, we propose a framework for comparing non-living and living collectives as a continuum based on their information architecture: that is, how information is stored and processed across different degrees of freedom. We review diverse examples of collective phenomena, characterized from an information-theoretic perspective, and offer views on future directions for quantifying living collective behaviors based on their informational structure.

集体行为被广泛认为是生命和智能系统的标志性属性。然而，已知许多不存在的简单物理系统的例子，但它们也显示出集体行为，这促使人们经常采用简单的物理模型来解释有生命的集体行为。要理解在活生生的例子中发生的集体行为，重要的是要确定在非生命和生命系统如何集体行动方面是否存在根本差异，以及可以从更简单的物理建立的直觉的限制。解释生物现象的例子。在这里，我们提出了一个框架，用于根据信息架构将非生物和有生命的集体作为一个连续体进行比较：也就是说，如何在不同的自由度上存储和处理信息。我们回顾了从信息论角度表征的集体现象的各种示例，并就基于信息结构量化生活集体行为的未来方向提出了看法。