Related papers: Self-Organization in Computation & Chemistry: Retu…
By uncovering the contrast between Artificial Intelligence and Natural-born Intelligence as a computational process, we define closed computing and open computing, and implement open computing within chemical reactions. This involves…
An object-oriented combinator chemistry was used to construct an artificial organism with a system architecture possessing characteristics necessary for organisms to evolve into more complex forms. This architecture supports modularity by…
A key step in the origin of life is the emergence of a primitive metabolism. This requires the formation of a subset of chemical reactions that is both self-sustaining and collectively autocatalytic. A generic theory to study such processes…
Many examples of cooperation exist in biology. In chemical systems however, which can sometimes be quite complex, we do not appear to observe intricate cooperative interactions. A key question for the origin of life, is then how can…
Disordered systems subject to a fluctuating environment can self-organize into a complex history-dependent response, retaining a memory of the driving. In sheared amorphous solids, self-organization is established by the emergence of a…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
The ability of a chemical reaction network to generate itself by catalyzed reactions from constantly present environmental food sources is considered a fundamental property in origin-of-life research. Based on Kaufmann's autocatalytic sets,…
Computing systems form the backbone of many aspects of our life, hence they are becoming as vital as water, electricity, and road infrastructures for our society. Yet, engineering long running computing systems that achieve their goals in…
While all organisms on Earth descend from a common ancestor, there is no consensus on whether the origin of this ancestral self-replicator was a one-off event or whether it was only the final survivor of multiple origins. Here we use the…
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…
Background: The idea that autocatalytic sets played an important role in the origin of life is not new. However, the likelihood of autocatalytic sets emerging spontaneously has long been debated. Recently, progress has been made along two…
Most of the grand challenges of humanity today involve complex agent-based systems, such as epidemiology, economics or ecology. However, remains as a pending task the challenge of identifying the general principles underlying their…
Stochastic fluctuations of molecule numbers are ubiquitous in biological systems. Important examples include gene expression and enzymatic processes in living cells. Such systems are typically modelled as chemical reaction networks whose…
The origin of life is often approached through the lens of replication, heredity, or molecular specificity. This paper proposes a thermodynamic framework in which the emergence of life is driven by the persistence of reaction pathways that…
We present a benchmark study of autonomous, chemical agents exhibiting associative learning of an environmental feature. Associative learning has been widely studied in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, but are most commonly…
The interaction networks of biological systems are known to take on several non-random structural properties, some of which are believed to positively influence system robustness. Researchers are only starting to understand how these…
The study of biological cells in terms of mesoscopic, nonequilibrium, nonlinear, stochastic dynamics of open chemical systems provides a paradigm for other complex, self-organizing systems with ultra-fast stochastic fluctuations, short-time…
Both scientists and children make important structural discoveries, yet their computational underpinnings are not well understood. Structure discovery has previously been formalized as probabilistic inference about the right structural form…
Evolution is often understood through genetic mutations driving changes in an organism's fitness, but there is potential to extend this understanding beyond the genetic code. We propose that natural products - complex molecules central to…
Self-organization is the generation of order out of local interactions in non-equilibrium [1]. It is deeply connected to all fields of science from physics, chemistry to biology where functional living structures self-assemble[2] and…