Related papers: Reprogramming Matter, Life, and Purpose
Our understanding of ordinary matter is remarkably accurate and complete, but it is based on principles that are very strange and unfamiliar. As I'll explain, we've come to understand matter to be a Music of the Void, in a remarkably…
In this book chapter we describe recent applications of artificial intelligence and in particular machine learning to active matter systems. Active matter is composed of agents, or particles, that are capable of propelling themselves. While…
Cosmological discoveries over the past century have completely changed our picture of our place in the universe. New observations have a realistic chance of probing nature on heretofore unimaginable scales, and as a result are changing the…
The concept of programmable matter envisions a very large number of tiny and simple robot particles forming a smart material. Even though the particles are restricted to local communication, local movement, and simple computation, their…
More than 30 years have passed since the Voyager 2 fly-bys of Uranus and Neptune. I discuss a range of lessons learned from Voyager, broadly grouped into process, planning, and people. In terms of process, we must be open to new concepts:…
Probabilistic programming has emerged as a powerful paradigm in statistics, applied science, and machine learning: by decoupling modelling from inference, it promises to allow modellers to directly reason about the processes generating…
Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…
Reversibility is a key issue in the interface between computation and physics, and of growing importance as miniaturization progresses towards its physical limits. Most foundational work on reversible computing to date has focussed on…
As the global population ages, there is increased interest in living longer and improving one's quality of life in later years. However, studying aging - the decline in body function - is expensive and time-consuming. And despite research…
To travel into the past, to observe it, perhaps to influence it and correct mistakes of one's youth, has been an abiding fantasy of mankind for as long as we have been aware of a past. Here are described some recent scientific…
Eudaemonics is the study of the nature, causes, and conditions of human well-being. According to the ethical theory of eudaemonia, reaping satisfaction and fulfillment from life is not only a desirable end, but a moral responsibility.…
Quantum computing technologies have become a hot topic in academia and industry receiving much attention and financial support from all sides. Building a quantum computer that can be used practically is in itself an outstanding challenge…
Artificial intelligence has recently experienced remarkable advances, fueled by large models, vast datasets, accelerated hardware, and, last but not least, the transformative power of differentiable programming. This new programming…
To better understand the deep significance of our best physical theories it could be interesting to compare our Universe with its models. It may happen that the differences between the model and reality can be made indistinguishable, to the…
Building a useful quantum computer is a grand science and engineering challenge, currently pursued intensely by teams around the world. In the 1980s, Richard Feynman and Yuri Manin observed independently that computers based on quantum…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
We offer our opinion on the benefits of integration of insights from active matter physics with principles of regulatory interactions and control to develop a field we term ``smart matter". This field can provide insight into important…
The aim of this essay is to analyze the role of quantum mechanics as an inherent characteristic of life. During the last ten years the problem of the origin of life has become an innovative research subject approached by many authors. The…
Decades of research in artificial intelligence (AI) have produced formidable technologies that are providing immense benefit to industry, government, and society. AI systems can now translate across multiple languages, identify objects in…
Programming for today's quantum computers is making significant strides toward modern workflows compatible with high performance computing (HPC), but fundamental challenges still remain in the integration of these vastly different…