Related papers: Information-Thermodynamic Bounds on Planetary Bios…
Scientific discovery can be framed as a thermodynamic process in which an agent invests physical work to acquire information about an environment under a finite work budget. Using established results about the thermodynamics of computing,…
Photosynthesis is central to Earth's biosphere and a prime candidate for sustaining complex life on habitable exoplanets, yet a thermodynamically consistent treatment of the work potential of stellar radiation at planetary surfaces is still…
In many real-world situations, there are constraints on the ways in which a physical system can be manipulated. We investigate the entropy production (EP) and extractable work involved in bringing a system from some initial distribution $p$…
Information transmission via communication between agents is ubiquitous on Earth, and is a vital facet of living systems. In this paper, we aim to quantify this rate of information transmission associated with Earth's biosphere and…
Environmental fluctuations can shape replicator dynamics, with important consequences for both prebiotic and modern ecosystems. However, it remains unclear how simple replicators can acquire and use information about fluctuating…
A basic task of information processing is information transfer (flow). Here we study a pair of Brownian particles each coupled to a thermal bath at temperature $T_1$ and $T_2$, respectively. The information flow in such a system is defined…
For sensory networks, we determine the rate with which they acquire information about the changing external conditions. Comparing this rate with the thermodynamic entropy production that quantifies the cost of maintaining the network, we…
Landauer's Principle states that the energy cost of information processing must exceed the product of the temperature and the change in Shannon entropy of the information-bearing degrees of freedom. However, this lower bound is achievable…
Making decisions freely presupposes that there is some indeterminacy in the environment and in the decision making engine. The former is reflected on the behavioral changes due to communicating: few changes indicate rigid environments;…
We integrate information-theoretic concepts into the design and analysis of optimistic algorithms and Thompson sampling. By making a connection between information-theoretic quantities and confidence bounds, we obtain results that relate…
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.…
Living systems maintain or increase local order by working against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thermodynamic consistency is restored as they dissipate heat, thereby increasing the net entropy of their environment. Recently introduced…
Fluctuation theorems impose fundamental bounds in the statistics of the entropy production, with the second law of thermodynamics being the most famous. Using information theory, we quantify the information of entropy production and find an…
Informational contributions to thermodynamics can be studied in isolation by considering systems with fully-degenerate Hamiltonians. In this regime, being in non-equilibrium -- termed informational non-equilibrium -- provides thermodynamic…
We make a case for "planetary computing" -- infrastructure to handle the ingestion, transformation, analysis and publication of global data products for furthering environmental science and enabling better informed policy-making. We draw on…
This letter exposes a tight connection between the thermodynamic efficiency of information processing and predictive inference. A generalized lower bound on dissipation is derived for partially observable information engines which are…
Resource-constrained systems are prevalent in communications. Such a system is composed of many components but only some of them can be allocated with resources such as time slots. According to the amount of information about the system,…
The Earth, like other planets with a relatively thick atmosphere, is not locally in radiative equilibrium and the transport of energy by the geophysical fluids (atmosphere and ocean) plays a fundamental role in determining its climate.…
We study thermodynamic limits when controllers operate with only partial observability of internal correlations in multipartite systems. Understanding the costs imposed by lack of information is crucial in settings where agents must act…
We consider overdamped physical systems evolving under a feedback-controlled fluctuating potential and in contact with a thermal bath at temperature $T$. A Markovian description of the dynamics, which keeps only the last value of the…