499,676 research outputs found
Are complex systems hard to evolve?
Evolutionary complexity is here measured by the number of trials/evaluations
needed for evolving a logical gate in a non-linear medium. Behavioural
complexity of the gates evolved is characterised in terms of cellular automata
behaviour. We speculate that hierarchies of behavioural and evolutionary
complexities are isomorphic up to some degree, subject to substrate specificity
of evolution and the spectrum of evolution parameters
DynamO: A free O(N) general event-driven molecular-dynamics simulator
Molecular-dynamics algorithms for systems of particles interacting through
discrete or "hard" potentials are fundamentally different to the methods for
continuous or "soft" potential systems. Although many software packages have
been developed for continuous potential systems, software for discrete
potential systems based on event-driven algorithms are relatively scarce and
specialized. We present DynamO, a general event-driven simulation package which
displays the optimal O(N) asymptotic scaling of the computational cost with the
number of particles N, rather than the O(N log(N)) scaling found in most
standard algorithms. DynamO provides reference implementations of the best
available event-driven algorithms. These techniques allow the rapid simulation
of both complex and large (>10^6 particles) systems for long times. The
performance of the program is benchmarked for elastic hard sphere systems,
homogeneous cooling and sheared inelastic hard spheres, and equilibrium
Lennard-Jones fluids. This software and its documentation are distributed under
the GNU General Public license and can be freely downloaded from
http://marcusbannerman.co.uk/dynamo
Hamiltonian tomography of dissipative systems under limited access: A biomimetic case study
The identification of parameters in the Hamiltonian that describes complex
many-body quantum systems is generally a very hard task. Recent attention has
focused on such problems of Hamiltonian tomography for networks constructed
with two-level systems. For open quantum systems, the fact that injected
signals are likely to decay before they accumulate sufficient information for
parameter estimation poses additional challenges. In this paper, we consider
use of the gateway approach to Hamiltonian tomography
\cite{Burgarth2009,Burgarth2009a} to complex quantum systems with a limited set
of state preparation and measurement probes. We classify graph properties of
networks for which the Hamiltonian may be estimated under equivalent conditions
on state preparation and measurement. We then examine the extent to which the
gateway approach may be applied to estimation of Hamiltonian parameters for
network graphs with non-trivial topologies mimicking biomolecular systems.Comment: 6 page
Quantum Annealing and Analog Quantum Computation
We review here the recent success in quantum annealing, i.e., optimization of
the cost or energy functions of complex systems utilizing quantum fluctuations.
The concept is introduced in successive steps through the studies of mapping of
such computationally hard problems to the classical spin glass problems. The
quantum spin glass problems arise with the introduction of quantum
fluctuations, and the annealing behavior of the systems as these fluctuations
are reduced slowly to zero. This provides a general framework for realizing
analog quantum computation.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figs (color online); new References Added. Reviews of
Modern Physics (in press
Design thinking support: information systems versus reasoning
Numerous attempts have been made to conceive and implement appropriate information systems to support architectural designers in their creative design thinking processes. These information systems aim at providing support in very diverse ways: enabling designers to make diverse kinds of visual representations of a design, enabling them to make complex calculations and simulations which take into account numerous relevant parameters in the design context, providing them with loads of information and knowledge from all over the world, and so forth. Notwithstanding the continued efforts to develop these information systems, they still fail to provide essential support in the core creative activities of architectural designers. In order to understand why an appropriately effective support from information systems is so hard to realize, we started to look into the nature of design thinking and on how reasoning processes are at play in this design thinking. This investigation suggests that creative designing rests on a cyclic combination of abductive, deductive and inductive reasoning processes. Because traditional information systems typically target only one of these reasoning processes at a time, this could explain the limited applicability and usefulness of these systems. As research in information technology is increasingly targeting the combination of these reasoning modes, improvements may be within reach for design thinking support by information systems
Quantum diffusion with disorder, noise and interaction
Disorder, noise and interaction play a crucial role in the transport
properties of real systems, but they are typically hard to control and study
both theoretically and experimentally, especially in the quantum case. Here we
explore a paradigmatic problem, the diffusion of a wavepacket, by employing
ultra-cold atoms in a disordered lattice with controlled noise and tunable
interaction. The presence of disorder leads to Anderson localization, while
both interaction and noise tend to suppress localization and restore transport,
although with completely different mechanisms. When only noise or interaction
are present we observe a diffusion dynamics that can be explained by existing
microscopic models. When noise and interaction are combined, we observe instead
a complex anomalous diffusion. By combining experimental measurements with
numerical simulations, we show that such anomalous behavior can be modeled with
a generalized diffusion equation, in which the noise- and interaction-induced
diffusions enter in an additive manner. Our study reveals also a more complex
interplay between the two diffusion mechanisms in regimes of strong interaction
or narrowband noise.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure
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