- Category
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Course Syllabus
- Name
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Natural Computation and Self-Organization—The Physics of Information Processing in Complex Systems
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- Description
- The course explores how nature's structure reflects how nature computes. It introduces intrinsic unpredictability (deterministic chaos) and the emergence of structure (self-organization) in natural complex systems. Using statistical mechanics, information theory, and computation theory, the course develops a systematic framework for analyzing processes in terms of their causal architecture. This is determined by answering three questions: (i) How much historical information does a process store? (ii) How is that information stored? And (iii) how is the stored information used to produce future behavior? The answers to these questions tell one how a system intrinsically computes.
- Institution
- University of California, Davis
- Author
- Jim Crutchfield
- Topics
- Nonlinear Dynamics, Emergence, Information Theory, Computation
- URL
- http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/courses/ncaso/
