Related papers: Self-assembly, modularity and physical complexity
Determining the complexity of molecules has important applications from molecular design to understanding the history of the process that led to the formation of the molecule. Currently, it is not possible to experimentally determine,…
Quantifying the evolution and complexity of materials is of importance in many areas of science and engineering, where a central open challenge is developing experimental complexity measurements to distinguish random structures from evolved…
In micro- and nano-scale systems, particles can be moved by using an external force like gravity or a magnetic field. In the presence of adhesive particles that can attach to each other, the challenge is to decide whether a shape is…
In this review, we discuss modularity and hierarchy in biological systems. We review examples from protein structure, genetics, and biological networks of modular partitioning of the geometry of biological space. We review theories to…
The goal of inverse self-assembly is to design inter-particle interactions capable of assembling the units into a desired target structure. The effective assembly of complex structures often requires the use of multiple components, each new…
The question how complex systems become more organized and efficient with time is open. Examples are, the formation of elementary particles from pure energy, the formation of atoms from particles, the formation of stars and galaxies, the…
The intuition that a long history is required for the emergence of complexity in natural systems is formalized using the notion of depth. The depth of a system is defined in terms of the number of parallel computational steps needed to…
The availability of big data in materials science offers new routes for analyzing materials properties and functions and achieving scientific understanding. Finding structure in these data that is not directly visible by standard tools and…
In contrast to most self-assembling synthetic materials, which undergo unbounded growth, many biological self-assembly processes are self-limited. That is, the assembled structures have one or more finite dimensions that are much larger…
Despite broad interest in self-organizing systems, there are few quantitative, experimentally-applicable criteria for self-organization. The existing criteria all give counter-intuitive results for important cases. In this Letter, we…
The design of complex materials and the formation of specific patterns often arise from the properties of the individual building blocks. In this respect, colloidal systems offer a unique opportunity because nowadays they can be synthesized…
Biological systems exploit self-assembly to create complex structures whose arrangements are finely controlled from molecular to mesoscopic level. Herein we report an example of using fully synthetic systems that mimic two levels of…
Inspired by the work of Feynman, Deutsch, We formally propose the theory of physical computability and accordingly, the physical complexity theory. To achieve this, a framework that can evaluate almost all forms of computation using various…
We use computer simulations to investigate self-assembly in a system of model chaperonin proteins, and in an Ising lattice gas. We discuss the mechanisms responsible for rapid and efficient assembly in these systems, and we use measurements…
We develop a general formalism for representing and understanding structure in complex systems. In our view, structure is the totality of relationships among a system's components, and these relationships can be quantified using information…
The self-assembly of molecules at surfaces can be caused by a range of physical mechanisms. Assembly can be driven by intermolecular forces, or molecule-surface forces, or both; it can result in structures that are in equilibrium or that…
In this paper we suggest that, under suitable conditions, supervised learning can provide the basis to formulate at the microscopic level quantitative questions on the phenotype structure of multicellular organisms. The problem of…
We propose a general framework for solving inverse self-assembly problems, i.e. designing interactions between elementary units such that they assemble spontaneously into a predetermined structure. Our approach uses patchy particles as…
We introduce a method for modeling a configuration of objects in 2D or 3D images using a mathematical "skeletal linking structure" which will simultaneously capture the individual shape features of the objects and their positional…
We propose a measure of shape which is appropriate for the study of a complicated geometric structure, defined using the topology of neighborhoods of the structure. One aspect of this measure gives a new notion of fractal dimension. We…