The Cost of Morphological Complexity

This study investigates the impact of imposing a cost on morphological complexity given co-adapting behavior-morphology couplings in simulated robots. Specifically, we investigate the environmental and evolutionary conditions for which morphological complexity can be evolved without sacrificing behavioral efficacy. This study evaluates the relationship between task difficulty (environment complexity) and evolved morphological complexity. We use multi-objective neuro-evolution to evolve robot controller-morphology couplings in task environments of increasing difficulty, where the objectives are to minimize the cost of (morphological) complexity and to maximize behavior quality (task performance). Results indicate that imposing a cost of complexity induces the evolution of simpler morphologies with negligible differences in behavior (task performance) across increasingly complex environments (increasing task difficulty)

The Cost of Complexity in Robot Bodies

The evolutionary cost of morphological complexity in biological populations remains an open question. This study investigates the impact of imposing a cost on morphological complexity given co-adapting behavior-morphology couplings in simulated robots. Specifically, we investigate the environmental and evolutionary conditions for which morphological complexity can be evolved without sacrificing behavioral efficacy. This study evaluates the relationship between between task difficulty (environment complexity) and evolved morphological complexity. We use multi-objective neuro-evolution to evolve robot controller-morphology couplings in task environments of increasing difficulty, where the objectives are to minimize the cost of (morphological) complexity and to maximize behavior quality (task performance) over evolutionary time. Results indicate that imposing a cost of complexity induces the evolution of simpler morphologies with negligible differences in behavior (task performance) across varying task environments. That is, with a cost of complexity, evolution maintained a constant selection pressure for morphological complexity across all environments

Phase-field model of long-time glass-like relaxation in binary fluid mixtures

We present a new phase-field model for binary fluids exhibiting typical signatures of self-glassiness, such as long-time relaxation, ageing and long-term dynamical arrest. The present model allows the cost of building an interface to become locally zero, while preserving global positivity of the overall surface tension. An important consequence of this property, which we prove analytically, is the emergence of compact configurations of fluid density. Owing to their finite-size support, these "compactons" can be arbitrarily superposed, thereby providing a direct link between the ruggedness of the free-energy landscape and morphological complexity in configurational space. The analytical picture is supported by numerical simulations of the proposed phase-field equation.Comment: 5 Pages, 6 Figure

Fine tuning Exo2, a small molecule inhibitor of secretion and retrograde trafficking pathways in mammalian cells

The small molecule 4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde (5,6,7,8-tetrahydro[1]benzothieno[2,3- d]pyrimidin-4-yl)hydrazone (Exo2) stimulates morphological changes at the mammalian Golgi and trans-Golgi network that are virtually indistinguishable from those induced by brefeldin A. Both brefeldin A and Exo2 protect cells from intoxication by Shiga(-like) toxins by acting on other targets that operate at the early endosome, but do so at the cost of high toxicity to target cells. The advantage of Exo2 is that it is much more amenable to chemical modification and here we report a range of Exo2 analogues produced by modifying the tetrahydrobenzothienopyrimidine core, the vanillin moiety and the hydrazone bond that links these two. These compounds were examined for the morphological changes they stimulated at the Golgi stack, the trans Golgi network and the transferrin receptor-positive early endosomes and this activity correlated with their inherent toxicity towards the protein manufacturing ability of the cell and their protective effect against toxin challenge. We have developed derivatives that can separate organelle morphology, target specificity, innate toxicity and toxin protection. Our results provide unique compounds with low toxicity and enhanced specificity to unpick the complexity of membrane trafficking networks

Effect of Changes in Layout Shape on Unit Construction Cost of Residential Buildings

The shape of a building layout is the spatial attribute that defines the outline of the building. It affects the areas and sizes of vertical components such as external walls and associated finishes, windows, partitions and associated finishes, etc., as well as the perimeter detailing such as ground beams, fascias, and the eaves of roofs. The conclusions of previous studies on the cost implication of building shape have been premised on the knowledge of building morphological and geometrical characteristics, and have lacked empirical authentication. This study used empirical data to investigate the effect of layout narrowness and complexity (irregularity) on total and unit construction costs. The data used is the Saudi Arabian ‘typical villa' as the base case at current prices and other variant shapes. The results of this study indicate that perimeter-to-floor ratio, unit construction cost and overall project cost are affected by variation in plan shape narrowness and complexity (irregularity). These results will assist construction professionals, especially the cost consultants, in making more objective design decisions and in giving cost advice related to plan layout for the benefits of their clients. Samaru Journal of Information Studies Vol. 7 (1) 2007: pp. 24-3

We are Designers Because We Can Abstract

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityDue to the increasing systems complexity, architecture design became an important issue. It gained interest and its importance was framed in three domains: as a way to understand complex systems, to design them, to manage their manufacturing process and to provide long-term rationality. The purpose of this paper is, firstly, to survey the existing definition approaches on architecture. Secondly, we propose a model for architecture design which articulates the potential linkage between two principle concepts: synthesis and abstraction. Our proposal model focuses on abstraction concept and permits an effective top-down design approach. It helps also designers to more respond to issues that characterize architecture design.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan

Linguistically Motivated Vocabulary Reduction for Neural Machine Translation from Turkish to English

The necessity of using a fixed-size word vocabulary in order to control the model complexity in state-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT) systems is an important bottleneck on performance, especially for morphologically rich languages. Conventional methods that aim to overcome this problem by using sub-word or character-level representations solely rely on statistics and disregard the linguistic properties of words, which leads to interruptions in the word structure and causes semantic and syntactic losses. In this paper, we propose a new vocabulary reduction method for NMT, which can reduce the vocabulary of a given input corpus at any rate while also considering the morphological properties of the language. Our method is based on unsupervised morphology learning and can be, in principle, used for pre-processing any language pair. We also present an alternative word segmentation method based on supervised morphological analysis, which aids us in measuring the accuracy of our model. We evaluate our method in Turkish-to-English NMT task where the input language is morphologically rich and agglutinative. We analyze different representation methods in terms of translation accuracy as well as the semantic and syntactic properties of the generated output. Our method obtains a significant improvement of 2.3 BLEU points over the conventional vocabulary reduction technique, showing that it can provide better accuracy in open vocabulary translation of morphologically rich languages.Comment: The 20th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT), Research Paper, 12 page

Morphological Computation: Nothing but Physical Computation

The purpose of this paper is to argue against the claim that morphological computation is substantially different from other kinds of physical computation. I show that some (but not all) purported cases of morphological computation do not count as specifically computational, and that those that do are solely physical computational systems. These latter cases are not, however, specific enough: all computational systems, not only morphological ones, may (and sometimes should) be studied in various ways, including their energy efficiency, cost, reliability, and durability. Second, I critically analyze the notion of “offloading” computation to the morphology of an agent or robot, by showing that, literally, computation is sometimes not offloaded but simply avoided. Third, I point out that while the morphology of any agent is indicative of the environment that it is adapted to, or informative about that environment, it does not follow that every agent has access to its morphology as the model of its environment