相关论文: Ambitions for theory in the physics of life
Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
Many biological systems approach physical limits to their performance, motivating the idea that their behavior and underlying mechanisms could be determined by such optimality. Nevertheless, optimization as a predictive principle has only…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…
The recent surge in the network modeling of complex systems has set the stage for a new era in the study of fundamental and applied aspects of optimization in collective behavior. This Focus Issue presents an extended view of the state of…
Information theory has explained the organization of many biological phenomena, from the physiology of sensory receptive fields to the variability of certain DNA sequence ensembles. Some scholars have proposed that information should…
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…
Information flow (or information transfer as may be called) the widely applicable general physics notion can be rigorously derived from first principles, rather than axiomatically proposed as an ansatz. Its logical association with…
``The purpose of life is to obtain knowledge, use it to live with as much satisfaction as possible, and pass it on with improvements and modifications to the next generation.'' This may sound philosophical, and the interpretation of words…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…
This paper makes a number of connections between life and various facets of genetic and evolutionary algorithms research. Specifically, it addresses the topics of adaptation, multiobjective optimization, decision making, deception, and…
We have a lot of relation to the encoding and the Theory of Information, when considering thinking. This is a natural process and, at once, the complex thing we investigate. This always was a challenge - to understand how our mind works,…
Algorithms for continuous optimization problems have a rich history of design and innovation over the past several decades, in which mathematical analysis of their convergence and complexity properties plays a central role. Besides their…
Information theory is a practical and theoretical framework developed for the study of communication over noisy channels. Its probabilistic basis and capacity to relate statistical structure to function make it ideally suited for studying…
This paper proposes a new thermodynamic hypothesis that states that a nonlinear natural system that is not isolated and involves positive feedbacks tends to minimize its resistance to the flow process through it that is imposed by its…
Information theory is a practical and theoretical framework developed for the study of communication over noisy channels. Its probabilistic basis and capacity to relate statistical structure to function make it ideally suited for studying…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
Information theory is gaining popularity as a tool to characterize performance of biological systems. However, information is commonly quantified without reference to whether or how a system could extract and use it; as a result,…
Highly-optimized complex transport networks serve crucial functions in many man-made and natural systems such as power grids and plant or animal vasculature. Often, the relevant optimization functional is non-convex and characterized by…