Related papers: Biological efficiency in processing information

Patterns are ubiquitous in nature, but how they form is often unclear. Turing developed a seminal theory to explain patterns based on reactions that counteract the equalizing tendency of diffusion. These reactions require continuous energy…

Answering the titular question has become a central motivation in the field of quantum biology, ever since the idea was raised following a series of experiments demonstrating wave-like behavior in photosynthetic complexes. Here, we report a…

A unified thermodynamic formalism describing the efficiency of learning is proposed. First, we derive an inequality, which is more strength than Clausius's inequality, revealing the lower bound of the entropy-production rate of a subsystem.…

This white paper lays out a vision of research and development in the field of artificial intelligence for the next decade (and beyond). Its denouement is a cyber-physical ecosystem of natural and synthetic sense-making, in which humans are…

Understanding the relationship between the structure of light-harvesting systems and their excitation energy transfer properties is of fundamental importance in many applications including the development of next generation photovoltaics.…

Does the brain construct an efficient representation of the sensory world? We review progress on this question, focusing on a series of experiments in the last decade which use fly vision as a model system in which theory and experiment can…

The transmission or reception of packets passing between computers can be represented in terms of time-stamped events and the resulting activity understood in terms of point-processes. Interestingly, in the disparate domain of neuroscience,…

Biological, artificial, and physical systems dissipate energy to accurately transmit information. While tools of information theory have been used to characterize information-processing capabilities, how reliably this information is…

The deep connection between thermodynamics, computation, and information is now well established both theoretically and experimentally. Here, we extend these ideas to show that thermodynamics also places fundamental constraints on…

A cognitive radio system has the ability to observe and learn from the environment, adapt to the environmental conditions, and use the radio spectrum more efficiently. It allows secondary users (SUs) to use the primary users (PUs) channels…

We consider the role of quantum correlations in the efficient use of information by a predictive quantum system, generalizing a recently proposed classical measure of non-predictive information to the quantum regime. We show that, as a…

Cells are often considered input-output devices that maximize the transmission of information by converting extracellular stimuli (input) via signaling pathways (communication channel) to cell behavior (output). However, in biological…

Living systems are often described utilizing informational analogies. An important open question is whether information is merely a useful conceptual metaphor, or intrinsic to the operation of biological systems. To address this question,…

This note provides a theorem showing, under suitable technical assumptions, that if a system S adapts to a class of external signals U, in the sense of egulation against disturbances or tracking signals in U, then S must ecessarily contain…

Time perception - how humans and animals perceive the passage of time - forms the basis for important cognitive skills such as decision-making, planning, and communication. In this work, we propose a framework for examining the mechanisms…

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,…

One of the basic frameworks in science views behavioral products as a process within a dynamic system. The mechanism might be seen as a representation of many instances of centralized control in real time. Many real systems, however,…

Memories are stored, retained, and recollected through complex, coupled processes operating on multiple timescales. To understand the computational principles behind these intricate networks of interactions we construct a broad class of…

Weakly activated signaling cascades can be modeled as linear systems. The input-to-output transfer function and the internal gain of a linear system, provide natural measures for the propagation of the input signal down the cascade and for…

The biological cell exhibits a fantastic range of behaviors, but ultimately these are governed by a handful of physical and chemical principles. Here we explore simple theory, known for decades and based on the simple thermodynamics of…