Related papers: Biological efficiency in processing information
Cognition is the process of knowing. As carried out by a dynamical system, it is the process by which the system absorbs information into its state. A complex network of agents cognizes knowledge about its environment, internal dynamics and…
The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology however its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to…
Intercellular signaling has an important role in organism development, but not all communication occurs using the same mechanism. Here, we analyze the energy efficiency of intercellular signaling by two canonical mechanisms: diffusion of…
Computational methods are the most effective tools we have besides scientific experiments to explore the properties of complex biological systems. Progress is slowing because digital silicon computers have reached their limits in terms of…
Using an extremely large number of processing elements in computing systems leads to unexpected phenomena, such as different efficiencies of the same system for different tasks, that cannot be explained in the frame of classical computing…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
Many living organisms can exploit quantum mechanical effects to gain distinct biological advantages. In plants, photosynthesis uses quantum coherence to achieve near 100% efficiency in energy transfer. With advances in experimental…
Biological sensory systems react to changes in their surroundings. They are characterized by fast response and slow adaptation to varying environmental cues. Insofar as sensory adaptive systems map environmental changes to changes of their…
Adaptive physical and biological systems continually process fluctuating information from their environments. When the environment is nonstationary, inference itself becomes a nonequilibrium process with thermodynamic cost. We analyse a…
Despite deep-learning being state-of-the-art for data-driven model predictions, it has not yet found frequent application in ecology. Given the low sample size typical in many environmental research fields, the default choice for the…
Using the formalism of information theory, we analyze the mechanism of information transduction in a simple one-step signaling cascade S$\rightarrow$X representing the gene regulatory network. Approximating the signaling channel to be…
Central to the functioning of a living cell is its ability to control the readout or expression of information encoded in the genome. In many cases, a single transcription factor protein activates or represses the expression of many genes.…
Living organisms are not just random collections of organic molecules. There is continuous information processing going on in the apparent bouncing around of molecules of life. Optimisation criteria in this information processing can be…
On the basis of introspective analysis, we establish a crucial requirement for the physical computation basis of consciousness: it should allow processing a significant amount of information together at the same time. Classical computation…
Quantum technology has the potential to revolutionize how we acquire and process experimental data to learn about the physical world. An experimental setup that transduces data from a physical system to a stable quantum memory, and…
Recent advances in nonequilibrium statistical physics have provided unprecedented insight into the thermodynamics of dynamic processes. The author recently used these advances to extend Landauer's semi-formal reasoning concerning the…
In this paper, we wish to investigate the dynamics of information transfer in evolutionary dynamics. We use information theoretic tools to track how much information an evolving population has obtained and managed to retain about different…
Biological synaptic transmission is unreliable, and this unreliability likely degrades neural circuit performance. While there are biophysical mechanisms that can increase reliability, for instance by increasing vesicle release probability,…
A primary motivation for research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of natural ecosystems. Ecosystems arc thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic…
One of the central aims of neuroscience is to reliably predict the behavioral response of an organism using its neural activity. If possible, this implies we can causally manipulate the neural response and design brain-computer-interface…