English
Related papers

Related papers: Thermodynamic selection: mechanisms and scenarios

200 papers

Adaptive systems -- such as a biological organism gaining survival advantage, an autonomous robot executing a functional task, or a motor protein transporting intracellular nutrients -- must model the regularities and stochasticity in their…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-04-13 A. B. Boyd , J. P. Crutchfield , M. Gu

In thermodynamics, an agent's ability to extract work is fundamentally constrained by their environment. Traditional frameworks struggle to capture how strategic decision-making under uncertainty, particularly an agent's tolerance for risk,…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-10-24 Maite Arcos , Philippe Faist , Takahiro Sagawa , Jonathan Oppenheim

Predicting future observations plays a central role in machine learning, biology, economics, and many other fields. It lies at the heart of organizational principles such as the variational free energy principle and has even been shown --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Lukas J. Fiderer , Paul C. Barth , Isaac D. Smith , Hans J. Briegel

On the one hand, the dissipated heat of a thermodynamic work extraction process upper bounds the non-predictive information, which the associated system encodes about its environment. Thus, emergent information processing capabilities can…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2020-09-10 Kai Ueltzhöffer

Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2014-09-29 Paul Skrzypczyk , Anthony J. Short , Sandu Popescu

Perfectly rational decision-makers maximize expected utility, but crucially ignore the resource costs incurred when determining optimal actions. Here we propose an information-theoretic formalization of bounded rational decision-making…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-06-04 Pedro A. Ortega , Daniel A. Braun

Thermodynamics teaches that if a system initially off-equilibrium is coupled to work sources, the maximum work that it may yield is governed by its energy and entropy. For finite systems this bound is usually not reachable. The maximum…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-10 A. E. Allahverdyan , R. Balian , Th. M. Nieuwenhuizen

Inspired by the primary goal of quantum thermodynamics -- to characterize quantum signatures and leverage their benefits in thermodynamic scenarios -- , we design a work extraction game within a bipartite framework that exhibits a quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-09-15 Tanmoy Biswas , Chandan Datta , Luis Pedro García-Pintos

Originally formulated for macroscopic machines, the laws of thermodynamics were recently shown to hold for quantum systems coupled to ideal sources of work (external classical fields) and heat (systems at equilibrium). Ongoing efforts have…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-06-29 Cyril Elouard , Camille Lombard Latune

I consider motivation and value-alignment in AI systems from the perspective of (constrained) entropy maximization. Though the structures encoding knowledge in any physical system can be understood as energetic constraints, only living…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-08-29 Alex B. Kiefer

The second law of thermodynamics, formulated as an ultimate bound on the maximum extractable work, has been rigorously derived in multiple scenarios. However, the unavoidable limitations that emerge due to the lack of control on small…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-04-27 H. Wilming , R. Gallego , J. Eisert

A perfectly rational decision-maker chooses the best action with the highest utility gain from a set of possible actions. The optimality principles that describe such decision processes do not take into account the computational costs of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-12-25 Jordi Grau-Moya , Daniel A. Braun

The strategic selection of resources by selfish agents is a classic research direction, with Resource Selection Games and Congestion Games as prominent examples. In these games, agents select available resources and their utility then…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Jonathan Gadea Harder , Simon Krogmann , Pascal Lenzner , Alexander Skopalik

The context of the present paper is stochastic thermodynamics - an approach to nonequilibrium thermodynamics rooted within the broader framework of stochastic control. In contrast to the classical paradigm of Carnot engines, we herein…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-01-08 Rui Fu , Olga Movilla Miangolarra , Amirhossein Taghvaei , Yongxin Chen , Tryphon T. Georgiou

Behavior in the context of game theory is described as a natural process that follows the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The rate of entropy increase as the payoff function is derived from statistical physics of open systems. The thermodynamic…

General Physics · Physics 2011-10-27 Jani Anttila , Arto Annila

The second law of thermodynamics uses change in free energy of macroscopic systems to set a bound on performed work. Ergotropy plays a similar role in microscopic scenarios, and is defined as the maximum amount of energy that can be…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-10-19 Tanmoy Biswas , Marcin Łobejko , Paweł Mazurek , Konrad Jałowiecki , Michał Horodecki

According to the second law of thermodynamics, for every transformation performed on a system which is in contact with an environment of fixed temperature, the extracted work is bounded by the decrease of the free energy of the system.…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-07-15 Vasco Cavina , Andrea Mari , Vittorio Giovannetti

Evolutionary game theory is a successful mathematical framework geared towards understanding the selective pressures that affect the evolution of the strategies of agents engaged in interactions with potential conflicts. While a…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2016-09-01 Christoph Adami , Jory Schossau , Arend Hintze

Traditional quantum thermodynamic frameworks associate work to energy exchanges induced by unitary transformations generated by external controls, and heat to energy exchanges induced by bath interaction. Recently, a framework was…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-01-06 Tiago F. F. Santos , Camille Latune

This thesis develops a decision-theoretic framework for extracting thermodynamic work from temporal correlations in quantum systems. We model a classical agent -- lacking quantum memory -- performing adaptive work extraction through…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-04-07 Ruo Cheng Huang
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›