Douglas G. Moore

Arizona State University | ASU · BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science

We have developed the concept of pathway assembly to explore the amount of extrinsic information required to build an object. To quantify this information in an agnostic way, we present a method to determine the amount of pathway assembly information contained within such an object by deconstructing the object into its irreducible parts, and then e...

We consider an iterated model of agents playing a two-player game on a graph. The agents change their strategies as the game progresses based on anticipated payoffs. Using only the time series of the agents’ strategies, we determine the pairwise mutual information between all agents in the graph, and use these values as a predictors of the graph’s...

The hypothesis that many living systems should exhibit near-critical behavior is well motivated theoretically, and an increasing number of cases have been demonstrated empirically. However, a systematic analysis across biological networks, which would enable identification of the network properties that drive criticality, has not yet been realized....

The study of collective behavior has traditionally relied on a variety of different methodological tools ranging from more theoretical methods such as population or game-theoretic models to empirical ones like Monte Carlo or multi-agent simulations. An approach that is increasingly being explored is the use of information theory as a methodological...

The complex dynamics of gene expression in living cells can be well-approximated using Boolean networks. The average sensitivity is a natural measure of stability in these systems: values below one indicate typically stable dynamics associated with an ordered phase, whereas values above one indicate chaotic dynamics. This yields a theoretically mot...

Collective decision-making systems rely on many agents to gather, process and exchange information to arrive at a group decision. Critical to group success is the transfer of information among agents and between agents and their environment. Without information transfer, no consensus can be achieved. Yet, the role of individual rules in determining...

The current paradigm views cancer as arising clonally from a degradation of genetic information in single cells. A complementary perspective, originating at the dawn of modern developmental biology, is that cancer is the result of a system disorder of algorithms that normally orchestrate individual cell activities toward specific anatomical structu...

This chapter introduces the technical details of the quantization of the closed superstring, prerequisite for subsequent chapters. Beginning with the closed superstring action, discussion quickly progresses to conformal invariance and nonzero conformal anomaly. It is then shown that, upon gauge fixing and the associated introduction of ghost fields...

The use of metaheuristic algorithms is proposed as a general method for searching the string landscape for string models with user-specified physical properties. One such algorithm, simulated annealing, is discussed at length and employed to carry out such surveys. Multiple energy functions are considered and it is shown that the particular energy...

The definition of free fermionic heterotic string (FFHS) gauge models is presented. These represent the simplest conceivable models from the perspective of string model building, but while they may be descriptions of our observable universe they do provide a firm foundation for exploration of the string landscape. This chapter discusses the uniquen...

This brief chapter introduces the heterotic string theories in the free fermionic (FF) formalism. The problem of ensuring modular invariance of the partition function is considered and reduced to expressions on the FF basis vectors and partition coefficients. We conclude the chapter by describing the procedure for explicitly constructing the massle...

In this thesis, the author describes the development of a software framework to systematically construct a particular class of weakly coupled free fermionic heterotic string models, dubbed gauge models. In their purest form, these models are maximally supersymmetric (N = 4), and thus only contain superpartners in their matter sector. This feature m...

Given that the scale of quantum gravity is not experimentally accessible, one naturally resorts to mathematical consistency as a measure for a good candidate theory to replace General Relativity at high energies. Reproducing the semi-classical results of black hole entropy has become a standard test for any prospective theory of quantum gravity. It...

General Relativity is known to break down at singularities. However, it is expected that quantum corrections become important when the curvature is of the order of Planck scale avoiding the singularity. By calculating the effect of tidal forces on a freely falling inertial frame, and assuming the least possible size of the frame to be of the Planck...