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This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
Time evolution equations for dynamical systems can often be derived from generating functionals. Examples are Newton's equations of motion in classical dynamics which can be generated within the Lagrange or the Hamiltonian formalism. We…
Generative AI systems have entered everyday academic, professional, and personal life with remarkable speed, yet most users encounter them as mysterious artifacts rather than intelligible systems. This chapter discusses large language…
Biologists and physicists have a rich tradition of modeling living systems with simple models composed of a few interacting components. Despite the remarkable success of this approach, it remains unclear how to use such finely tuned models…
Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…
Biological systems represent time from microseconds to years. An important gap in our knowledge concerns the mechanisms for encoding time intervals of hundreds of milliseconds to minutes that matter for tasks like navigation, communication,…
Unlike many physical nonequilibrium systems, in biological systems, the coupling to external energy sources is not a fixed parameter but adaptively controlled by the system itself. We do not have theoretical frameworks that allow for such…
We propose a model to characterize how a diffusing population adapts under a time periodic selection, while its environment undergoes shifts and size changes, leading to significant differences with classical results on fixed domains. After…
Several abilities of biological systems, such as adaptation to natural environment, or of animals to learn patterns when appropriately trained, are features that are extremely useful, if emulated by electronic circuits, in applications…
Modern recommender systems operate in uniquely dynamic settings: user interests, item pools, and popularity trends shift continuously, and models must adapt in real time without forgetting past preferences. While existing tutorials on…
Extending and modifying his domain of life by artifact production is one of the main characteristics of humankind. From the first hominid, who used a wood stick or a stone for extending his upper limbs and augmenting his gesture strength,…
Self-organization can be broadly defined as the ability of a system to display ordered spatio-temporal patterns solely as the result of the interactions among the system components. Processes of this kind characterize both living and…
The fundamental time-reversal invariance of dynamical systems can be broken in various ways. One way is based on the presence of resonances and their interactions giving rise to unstable dynamical systems, leading to well-defined time…
Continual learning refers to the ability of a biological or artificial system to seamlessly learn from continuous streams of information while preventing catastrophic forgetting, i.e., a condition in which new incoming information strongly…
In this paper we present an alternative approach to formalize the theory of logic programming. In this formalization we allow existential quantified variables and equations in queries. In opposite to standard approaches the role of answer…
This paper presents a high-level conceptual framework to help orient the discussion and implementation of open-endedness in evolutionary systems. Drawing upon earlier work by Banzhaf et al., three different kinds of open-endedness are…
What is information, physically, and why does it so reliably emerge in living, cultural, and technological systems? Existing theories quantify uncertainty, cost, or compressibility, but do not identify which physical structures count as…
At its core, the physics paradigm adopts a reductionist approach, aiming to understand fundamental phenomena by decomposing them into simpler, elementary processes. While this strategy has been tremendously successful in physics, it has…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
Time can be defined as the duration between events. It is irreversible. When used as a variable in quantifying the changing properties of matter, this irreversibility of time is incompatible with Newton's deterministic mechanics and with…