Related papers: Self-assembly, modularity and physical complexity
Many living and non-living complex systems can be modeled and understood as collective systems made of heterogeneous components that self-organize and generate nontrivial morphological structures and behaviors. This chapter presents a brief…
Both biological and artificial self-assembly processes can take place by a range of different schemes, from the successive addition of identical building blocks, to hierarchical sequences of intermediates, all the way to the fully…
Measurement incompatibility is one of the basic aspects of quantum theory. Here we study the structure of the set of compatible -- i.e. jointly measurable -- measurements. We are interested in whether or not there exist compatible…
While we have intuitive notions of structure and complexity, the formalization of this intuition is non-trivial. The statistical complexity is a popular candidate. It is based on the idea that the complexity of a process can be quantified…
In this paper we examine the concept of complexity as it applies to generative art and design. Complexity has many different, discipline specific definitions, such as complexity in physical systems (entropy), algorithmic measures of…
We consider the problem of approximating a two-dimensional shape contour (or curve segment) using discrete assembly systems, which allow to build geometric structures based on limited sets of node and edge types subject to edge length and…
Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…
Compositionality supports the manipulation of large systems by working on their components. For model-based testing, this means that large systems can be tested by modelling and testing their components: passing tests for all components…
Colloidal molecules are designed to mimic their molecular analogues through their anisotropic shape and interactions. However, current experimental realizations are missing the structural flexibility present in real molecules thereby…
Interconnected ensembles of biological entities are perhaps some of the most complex systems that modern science has encountered so far. In particular, scientists have concentrated on understanding how the complexity of the interacting…
A steadily growing computational power is employed to perform molecular dynamics simulations of biological macromolecules, which represents at the same time an immense opportunity and a formidable challenge. In fact, large amounts of data…
We prove that by successively combining subassemblies, we can achieve sublinear construction times for "staged" assembly of micro-scale objects from a large number of tiny particles, for vast classes of shapes; this is a significant advance…
A challenge of molecular self-assembly is to understand how to design particles that self-assemble into a desired structure and not any of a potentially large number of undesired structures. Here we use simulation to show that a strategy of…
Self-assembly kinetics is usually described by approaches which assume that the shape of the aggregates has a definite form (e.g., spherical, cylindrical, cubic, etc), however that is unlikely to be the case in many finite-sized…
Controlling the self-assembly of supramolecular structures is vital for living cells, and a central challenge for engineering at the nano- and microscales. Nevertheless, even particles without optimized shapes can robustly form well-defined…
Many structural properties of conventional passive materials are known to arise from the symmetries of their microscopic constituents. By contrast, it is largely unclear how the interplay between cell shape and self-propulsion controls the…
The choice of structural resolution is a fundamental aspect of protein modelling, determining the balance between descriptive power and interpretability. Although atomistic simulations provide maximal detail, much of this information is…
Molecular diffusion measurements are widely used to probe microstructure in materials and living organisms noninvasively. The precise relation of diffusion metrics to microstructure remains a major challenge: In complex samples, it is often…
In this review we discuss recent advances in the self-assembly of self-propelled colloidal particles and highlight some of the most exciting results in this field with a specific focus on dry active matter. We explore this phenomenology…
We suggest two metrics for assessing the quality of atomistic configurations of disordered materials, both of which are based on quantifying the orientational distribution of neighbours around each atom in the configuration. The first…