Related papers: The World as Evolving Information
The notion of information pervades informal descriptions of biological systems, but formal treatments face the problem of defining a quantitative measure of information rooted in a concept of fitness, which is itself an elusive notion.…
Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as…
Theoretical physicists have been fascinated by the phenomena of life for more than a century. As we engage with more realistic descriptions of living systems, however, things get complicated. After reviewing different reactions to this…
Intelligence is a fundamental part of all living things, as well as the foundation for Artificial Intelligence. In this primer we explore the ideas associated with intelligence and, by doing so, understand the implications and constraints…
A kinetic approach to the notion of information is proposed, based on Liouville kinetic theory. The general kinetic equation for the evolution of the N-particle information $\mathcal{I}_N$ in a Hamiltonian system of large particle number…
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…
In the last years the debate on complexity has been developing and developing in transdisciplinary way to meet the need of explanation for highly organized collective behaviors and sophisticated hierarchical arrangements in physical,…
In the present work, via computational simulation we study the statistical distribution of people versus number of steps acquired by them in a learning process, considering Darwin classical theory of evolution, i.e. competition, learning…
A natural way of quantifying the ``amount of information'' in decision problems yields a globally concave value for information. Another (in contrast, adversarial) way almost never does.
One can study communications by using Shannon's (1948) mathematical theory of communication. In social communications, however, the channels are not "fixed", but themselves subject to change. Communication systems change by communicating…
Over the past decade quantum information theory has developed into a vigorous field of research despite the fact that quantum information, as a precise concept, is undefined. Indeed the very idea of viewing quantum states as carriers of…
We give a condensed and accessible summary of a recent derivation of quantum theory from information-theoretic principles, and use it to study the consequences of this and other reconstructions for our conceptual understanding of the…
Biological information processing manifests a huge variety in its complexity and capability among different organisms, which presumably stems from the evolutionary optimization under limited computational resources. Starting from the…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…
This text presents the research field of natural/unconventional computing as it appears in the book COMPUTING NATURE. The articles discussed consist a selection of works from the Symposium on Natural Computing at AISB-IACAP (British Society…
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…
Well known biological approximations are universal, i.e. invariant to transformations from one species to another. With no other experimental data, such invariance yields exact conservation (with respect to biological diversity and…