Model of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction

The article describes results of the modified model of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, which resembles rather well the limit set observed upon experimental performance of the reaction in the Petri dish. We discuss the concept of the ignition of circular waves and show that only the asymmetrical ignition leads to the formation of spiral structures. From the qualitative assumptions on the behavior of dynamic systems, we conclude that the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction likely forms a regular grid.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figure

Chatbot Theory: A naïve and elementary theory for dialogue management

Due to the increasing interested and use of chatbot, its properties and operation possibilities shall be proper realized matching both safety and security issues as well as present the several uses and compositions that this technology supports. This paper focus is on dialogue management since it is considered the core of a chatbot. The dialogue manager is responsible to, more than to transform an input sentence into an output one, hold the illusion of a human conversation. In this sense, it is presented an inceptive theoretical framework through a formal way for chatbots that can be used as a reference to explore, compose, build and discuss chatbots. The discussion is performed mostly on ELIZA since, due to its historical records, it can be considered an important reference chatbot, nevertheless, the proposed theory is compatible with the most recent technologies such those using machine and deep learning. The paper then presents some sketchy instances in order to explore the support provided by the theory.This paper has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-0070 43 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - Project UID/CEC/ 00319/2013

Bounds on the Complexity of Halfspace Intersections when the Bounded Faces have Small Dimension

We study the combinatorial complexity of D-dimensional polyhedra defined as the intersection of n halfspaces, with the property that the highest dimension of any bounded face is much smaller than D. We show that, if d is the maximum dimension of a bounded face, then the number of vertices of the polyhedron is O(n^d) and the total number of bounded faces of the polyhedron is O(n^d^2). For inputs in general position the number of bounded faces is O(n^d). For any fixed d, we show how to compute the set of all vertices, how to determine the maximum dimension of a bounded face of the polyhedron, and how to compute the set of bounded faces in polynomial time, by solving a polynomial number of linear programs

Evidence from GC-TRFLP that Bacterial Communities in Soil Are Lognormally Distributed

The Species Abundance Distribution (SAD) is a fundamental property of ecological communities and the form and formation of SADs have been examined for a wide range of communities including those of microorganisms. Progress in understanding microbial SADs, however, has been limited by the remarkable diversity and vast size of microbial communities. As a result, few microbial systems have been sampled with sufficient depth to generate reliable estimates of the community SAD. We have used a novel approach to characterize the SAD of bacterial communities by coupling genomic DNA fractionation with analysis of terminal restriction fragment length polymorphisms (GC-TRFLP). Examination of a soil microbial community through GC-TRFLP revealed 731 bacterial operational taxonomic units (OTUs) that followed a lognormal distribution. To recover the same 731 OTUs through analysis of DNA sequence data is estimated to require analysis of 86,264 16S rRNA sequences. The approach is examined and validated through construction and analysis of simulated microbial communities in silico. Additional simulations performed to assess the potential effects of PCR bias show that biased amplification can cause a community whose distribution follows a power-law function to appear lognormally distributed. We also show that TRFLP analysis, in contrast to GC-TRFLP, is not able to effectively distinguish between competing SAD models. Our analysis supports use of the lognormal as the null distribution for studying the SAD of bacterial communities as for plant and animal communities

Reconstruction of cellular variability from spatiotemporal patterns of Dictyostelium discoideum

Variability in cell properties can be an important driving mechanism behind spatiotemporal patterns in biological systems, as the degree of cell-to-cell differences determines the capacity of cells to locally synchronize and, consequently, form patterns on a larger spatial scale. In principle, certain features of spatial patterns emerging with time may be regulated by variability or, more specifically, by certain constellations of cell-to-cell differences. Similarly, measuring variability in a system (i.e. the spatial distribution of cell-cell differences) may help predict properties of later-stage patterns

Alternative oxidase gene family in Hypericum perforatum L.: characterization and expression at the post-germinative phase

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Patterns of relative species abundance in rainforests and coral reefs

A formidable many-body problem in ecology is to understand the complex of factors controlling patterns of relative species abundance (RSA) in communities of interacting species. Unlike many problems in physics, the nature of the interactions in ecological communities is not completely known. Although most contemporary theories in ecology start with the basic premise that species interact, here we show that a theory in which all interspecific interactions are turned off leads to analytical results that are in agreement with RSA data from tropical forests and coral reefs. The assumption of non-interacting species leads to a sampling theory for the RSA that yields a simple approximation at large scales to the exact theory. Our results show that one can make significant theoretical progress in ecology by assuming that the effective interactions among species are weak in the stationary states in species-rich communities such as tropical forests and coral reefs

Defining and simulating open-ended novelty: requirements, guidelines, and challenges

The open-endedness of a system is often defined as a continual production of novelty. Here we pin down this concept more fully by defining several types of novelty that a system may exhibit, classified as variation, innovation, and emergence. We then provide a meta-model for including levels of structure in a system’s model. From there, we define an architecture suitable for building simulations of open-ended novelty-generating systems and discuss how previously proposed systems fit into this framework. We discuss the design principles applicable to those systems and close with some challenges for the community