Related papers: Performance limits and trade-offs in entropy-drive…
In the paradigm of thermodynamic computing, instead of behaving deterministically, hardware undergoes a stochastic process in order to sample from a distribution of interest. While it has been hypothesized that thermodynamic computers may…
Making decisions freely presupposes that there is some indeterminacy in the environment and in the decision making engine. The former is reflected on the behavioral changes due to communicating: few changes indicate rigid environments;…
Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that,…
Biology stores information and computes at the molecular scale, yet the ways in which it does so are often distinct from human-engineered computers. Mapping biological computation onto architectures familiar to computer science remains an…
Many biological decision-making processes can be viewed as performing a classification task over a set of inputs, using various chemical and physical processes as "biological hardware." In this context, it is important to understand the…
The high energy consumption of electronic data processors, together with physical challenges limiting their further improvement, has triggered intensive interest in alternative computation paradigms. Here we focus on network-based…
Provided that there is no theoretical frame for complex engineered systems (CES) as yet, this paper claims that bio-inspired engineering can help provide such a frame. Within CES bio-inspired systems play a key role. The disclosure from…
Nonequilibrium processes break time-reversal symmetry and generate entropy. Living systems are driven out-of-equilibrium at the microscopic level of molecular motors that exploit chemical potential gradients to transduce free energy to…
Strand displacement and tile assembly systems are designed to follow prescribed kinetic rules (i.e., exhibit a specific time-evolution). However, the expected behavior in the limit of infinite time--known as thermodynamic equilibrium--is…
One of the major resource requirements of computers - ranging from biological cells to human brains to high-performance (engineered) computers - is the energy used to run them. Those costs of performing a computation have long been a focus…
Computers are deterministic dynamical systems (CHAOS 19:033124, 2009). Among other things, that implies that one should be able to use deterministic forecast rules to predict their behavior. That statement is sometimes-but not always-true.…
It is now well established that there is no lower bound for the energy dissipated during a computation. The relevance of the zero-energy limit is unclear, however, because it entails computations that are unreliable or infinitely slow, or…
The promise of chemical computation lies in controlling systems incompatible with traditional electronic micro-controllers, with applications in synthetic biology and nano-scale manufacturing. Computation is typically embedded in…
Cells can be considered as systems that utilize changes in thermodynamic entropy as information. Therefore, they serve as useful models for investigating the relationships between entropy production and information transmission, i.e.,…
Biological organisms must perform computation as they grow, reproduce, and evolve. Moreover, ever since Landauer's bound was proposed it has been known that all computation has some thermodynamic cost -- and that the same computation can be…
In quantum chemistry, the price paid by all known efficient model chemistries is either the truncation of the Hilbert space or uncontrolled approximations. Theoretical computer science suggests that these restrictions are not mere…
Living systems efficiently use chemical fuel to do work, process information, and assemble patterns despite thermal noise. Whether high efficiency arises from general principles or specific fine-tuning is unknown. Here, applying a recent…
In various chemical systems enthalpy-entropy compensation (EEC) is a well-known rule of behavior, although the physical roots of it are still not completely understood. It has been frequently questioned whether EEC is a truly physical…
We propose a dedicated model to assist with the life cycle analysis of emissions of scientific computing centres. The model takes into account both the embodied carbon and emissions from use, as well as other factors such as data centre…
Real-world computers have operational constraints that cause nonzero entropy production (EP). In particular, almost all real-world computers are ``periodic'', iteratively undergoing the same physical process; and ``local", in that…