Publications (2)0 Total impact
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Article: Stigmergic gene transfer and emergence of universal coding.
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ABSTRACT: We consider a simple information-theoretic model for evolutionary dynamics approaching the "coding threshold," where the capacity to symbolically represent nucleic acid sequences emerges in response to a change in environmental conditions. We study the conditions when a coupling between the dynamics of a "proto-cell" and its proto-symbolic representation becomes beneficial in terms of preserving the proto-cell's information in a noisy environment. In particular, we are interested in understanding the behavior at the "error threshold" level, which, in our case, turns out to be a whole "error interval." The useful coupling is accompanied by self-organization of internal processing, i.e., an increase in complexity within the evolving system. Second, we study whether and how different proto-cells can stigmergically share such information via a joint encoding, even if they have slightly different individual dynamics. Implications for the emergence of biological genetic code are discussed.HFSP journal. 10/2009; 3(5):317-27. -
Article: Modelling stigmergic gene transfer.
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ABSTRACT: We consider an information-theoretic model studying the conditions when a separation between the dynamics of a 'proto-cell' and its proto-symbolic representation becomes beneficial in terms of preserving the proto-cell's information in a noisy environment. In particular, we are interested in understanding the behaviour at the "error threshold" level which, in our case, turns out to be a whole "error inter-val". We separate the phenomena into a "waste" and a "loss" component; the "waste" measures "packaging" information which envelops the proto-cell's information, but itself does not contain any information of interest, the "loss" measures how much of the proto-symbolically encoded information is actually lost. We observe that transitions in the waste/loss functions correspond to the boundaries of the "error inter-val". Secondly, we study whether and how different proto-cells can share such information via a joint code, even if they have slightly different individual dynamics. Implications for the emergence of biological genetic code are discussed.
