Related papers: What does it mean for a system to compute?
Many dynamical systems found in biology, ranging from genetic circuits to the human brain to human social systems, are inherently computational. Although extensive research has explored their resulting functions and behaviors, the…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
The concept of random dynamical system is a comparatively recent development combining ideas and methods from the well developed areas of probability theory and dynamical systems. Due to our inaccurate knowledge of the particular physical…
Computer-based modelling and simulation have become useful tools to facilitate humans to understand systems in different domains, such as physics, astrophysics, chemistry, biology, economics, engineering and social science. A complex system…
The brain is often called a computer and likened to a Turing machine, in part because the mind can manipulate discrete symbols such as numbers. But the brain is a dynamical system, more like a Watt governor than a Turing machine. Can a…
The relationship between brains and computers is often taken to be merely metaphorical. However, genuine computational systems can be implemented in virtually any media; thus, one can take seriously the view that brains literally compute.…
Artificial computing machinery transforms representations through an objective process, to be interpreted subjectively by humans, so the machine and the interpreter are different entities, but in the putative natural computing both…
Dynamical Systems theory generally deals with fixed point iterations of continuous functions. Computation by Turing machine although is a fixed point iteration but is not continuous. This specific category of fixed point iterations can only…
Dynamical systems see widespread use in natural sciences like physics, biology, chemistry, as well as engineering disciplines such as circuit analysis, computational fluid dynamics, and control. For simple systems, the differential…
We consider the basic features of complex dynamical and control systems. Special attention is paid to the problems of synthesis of dynamical models of complex systems, construction of efficient control models, and to the development of…
Computation, if treated as a set of physical processes that act on information represented by states of matter, encompasses biological systems, digital systems, and other constructs, and may be a fundamental measure of living systems. The…
Computation plays a key role in predicting and analyzing natural phenomena. There are two fundamental barriers to our ability to computationally understand the long-term behavior of a dynamical system that describes a natural process. The…
Self-replication is central to all life, and yet how it dynamically emerges in physical, non-equilibrium systems remains poorly understood. Von Neumann's pioneering work in the 1940s and subsequent developments suggest a natural hypothesis:…
This chapter serves as an introduction to systems engineering focused on the broad issues surrounding realizing complex integrated systems. What is a system? We pose a number of possible definitions and perspectives, but leave open the…
The applicability of computational and dynamical systems models to organisms is scrutinized, using examples from developmental biology and cognition. Developmental morphogenesis is dependent on the inherent material properties of developing…
Complex Systems were identified and studied in different fields, such as physics, biology, and economics. These systems exhibit exciting properties such as self-organization, robust order, and emergence. In recent years, software systems…
Dynamics play a critical role in computation. The principled evolution of states over time enables both biological and artificial networks to represent and integrate information to make decisions. In the past few decades, significant…
Computation, the use of a computer to solve, simulate, or visualize a physical problem, has revolutionized how physics research is done. Computation is used widely to model systems, to simulate experiments, and to analyze data. Yet, in most…
Scientists often think of the world (or some part of it) as a dynamical system, a stochastic process, or a generalization of such a system. Prominent examples of systems are (i) the system of planets orbiting the sun or any other classical…
The increasing difficulty in continued development of digital electronic logic has led to a renewed interest in alternative approaches. Oscillatory computing is one such approach that leverages alternative physical systems and computation…