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Ladderpath Approach: How Tinkering and Reuse Increase Complexity and Information
Version 1
: Received: 16 July 2022 / Approved: 18 July 2022 / Online: 18 July 2022 (09:06:48 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Liu, Y.; Di, Z.; Gerlee, P. Ladderpath Approach: How Tinkering and Reuse Increase Complexity and Information. Entropy 2022, 24, 1082. Liu, Y.; Di, Z.; Gerlee, P. Ladderpath Approach: How Tinkering and Reuse Increase Complexity and Information. Entropy 2022, 24, 1082.
Abstract
The notion of information and complexity are important concepts in many scientific fields such as molecular biology, evolutionary theory, and exobiology. Many measures of these quantities, either rely on a statistical notion of information, are difficult to compute, or can only be applied to strings. Based on assembly theory, we propose the notion of a \textit{ladderpath}, which describes how an object can be decomposed into a hierarchical structure using repetitive elements. From the ladderpath two measures naturally emerge: the ladderpath-index and the order-index, which represent two axes of complexity. We show how the ladderpath approach can be applied to both strings and spatial patterns and argue that all systems that undergo evolution can be described as ladderpaths. Further, we discuss possible applications to human language and the origins of life. The ladderpath approach provides a novel characterization of the information that is contained in a single object (or a system) and could aid in our understanding of evolving systems and the origin of life in particular.
Keywords
Complexity; Syntactic information; Shannon entropy; Kolmogorov complexity; Hierarchy; Module; Origin of life; Alien signal; Language; Evolution
Subject
Physical Sciences, Thermodynamics
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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