Interaction of molecular motors can enhance their efficiency

Particles moving in oscillating potential with broken mirror symmetry are considered. We calculate their energetic efficiency, when acting as molecular motors carrying a load against external force. It is shown that interaction between particles enhances the efficiency in wide range of parameters. Possible consequences for artificial molecular motors are discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure

Quantum Multiplexers, Parrondo Games, and Proper Quantization

A quantum logic gate of particular interest to both electrical engineers and game theorists is the quantum multiplexer. This shared interest is due to the facts that an arbitrary quantum logic gate may be expressed, up to arbitrary accuracy, via a circuit consisting entirely of variations of the quantum multiplexer, and that certain one player games, the history dependent Parrondo games, can be quantized as games via a particular variation of the quantum multiplexer. However, to date all such quantizations have lacked a certain fundamental game theoretic property. The main result in this dissertation is the development of quantizations of history dependent quantum Parrondo games that satisfy this fundamental game theoretic property. Our approach also yields fresh insight as to what should be considered as the proper quantum analogue of a classical Markov process and gives the first game theoretic measures of multiplexer behavior.Comment: Doctoral dissertation, Portland State University, 138 pages, 22 figure

Too good to be true: when overwhelming evidence fails to convince

Is it possible for a large sequence of measurements or observations, which support a hypothesis, to counterintuitively decrease our confidence? Can unanimous support be too good to be true? The assumption of independence is often made in good faith, however rarely is consideration given to whether a systemic failure has occurred. Taking this into account can cause certainty in a hypothesis to decrease as the evidence for it becomes apparently stronger. We perform a probabilistic Bayesian analysis of this effect with examples based on (i) archaeological evidence, (ii) weighing of legal evidence, and (iii) cryptographic primality testing. We find that even with surprisingly low systemic failure rates high confidence is very difficult to achieve and in particular we find that certain analyses of cryptographically-important numerical tests are highly optimistic, underestimating their false-negative rate by as much as a factor of $2^{80}$