Related papers: On Artificial Life and Emergent Computation in Phy…
Human intelligence emerged through the process of natural selection and evolution on Earth. We investigate what it would take to re-create this process in silico. While past work has often focused on low-level processes (such as simulating…
We have evolved an IT system that is ubiquitous and pervasive and integrated into most aspects of our lives. Many of us are working on 4th and 5th level refinements in efficiency and functionality. But, we stand on the shoulders of those…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
With recent and rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), understanding the foundation of purposeful behaviour in autonomous agents is crucial for developing safe and efficient systems. While artificial neural networks have…
Living systems continuously sense, integrate, and act on chemical information using multiscale biochemical networks whose dynamics are inherently nonlinear, adaptive, and energy-efficient. Yet, most attempts to harness such "wetware" for…
Exascale computing holds great opportunities for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. However, to take full advantage of the new possibilities, we must learn how to focus computational power on the discovery of complex molecular mechanisms,…
Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental in living and engineering systems. This has stimulated the new field of active matter in recent years, which focuses on the physical aspects of propulsion mechanisms, and on motility-induced…
As deep learning systems are scaled up to many billions of parameters, relating their internal structure to external behaviors becomes very challenging. Although daunting, this problem is not new: Neuroscientists and cognitive scientists…
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…
Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they…
Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…
Self-replication is central to all life, and yet how it dynamically emerges in physical, non-equilibrium systems remains poorly understood. Von Neumann's pioneering work in the 1940s and subsequent developments suggest a natural hypothesis:…
Machine learning, particularly in the form of deep learning, has driven most of the recent fundamental developments in artificial intelligence. Deep learning is based on computational models that are, to a certain extent, bio-inspired, as…
Metabolic networks perform some of the most fundamental functions in living cells, including energy transduction and building block biosynthesis. While these are the best characterized networks in living systems, understanding their…
The accelerated path of technological development, particularly at the interface between hardware and biology has been suggested as evidence for future major technological breakthroughs associated to our potential to overcome biological…
What does it mean to claim that a physical or natural system computes? One answer, endorsed here, is that computing is about programming a system to behave in different ways. This paper offers an account of what it means for a physical…
As it is getting increasingly difficult to achieve gains in the density and power efficiency of microelectronic computing devices because of lithographic techniques reaching fundamental physical limits, new approaches are required to…
Recent computational experiments have demonstrated the spontaneous emergence of self-replicating programs across universal automata, artificial chemistries, and self-modifying code systems. Remarkably, these results arise without explicit…
Wearable devices are a fast-growing technology with impact on personal healthcare for both society and economy. Due to the widespread of sensors in pervasive and distributed networks, power consumption, processing speed, and system…
The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…