Filed under Adaptivity, coding, emergence, evolutionary computing, genetic code, paper by oliver | 0 comments
The principle of least effort in communications has been shown, by Ferrer i Cancho and Solé, to explain emergence of power laws (e.g., Zipf’s law) in human languages. In our new paper, Origins of Scaling in Genetic Code (O. Obst, D. Polani, M. Prokopenko), published on ECAL 2009, we apply the principle and the information-theoretic model of Ferrer i Cancho and Solé to genetic coding. The application of the principle is achieved via equating the ambiguity of signals used by “speakers” with codon usage, on the one hand, and the effort of “hearers” with needs of amino acid translation mechanics, on the other hand. The re-interpreted model captures the case of the typical (vertical) gene transfer, and confirms that Zipf’s law can be found in the transition between referentially useless systems (i.e., ambiguous genetic coding) and indexical reference systems (i.e., zero-redundancy genetic coding). As with linguistic symbols, arranging genetic codes according to Zipf’s law is observed to be the optimal solution for maximising the referential power under the effort constraints. Thus, the model identifies the origins of scaling in genetic coding — via a trade-off between codon usage and needs of amino acid translation. Furthermore, the paper extends Ferrer i Cancho Solé model to multiple inputs, reaching out toward the case of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) where multiple contributors may share the same genetic coding. Importantly, the extended model also leads to a sharp transition between referentially useless systems (ambiguous HGT) and indexical reference systems (zero-redundancy HGT). Zipf’s law is also observed to be the optimal solution in the HGT case.
genetic code, evolution, language, zipf’s law, horizontal gene transfer
Filed under AI, Call for Participation, Evolutionary biology, evolutionary computing, learning, Neural Networks, Neurobiology, neuroscience, summer school by oliver | 0 comments
There is an international summer school on Functional Genomics at the Baia Samuele Conference Centre, Scicli, Sicily, Italy, July 5th-19th 2008. The webpage is http://www.functional-genomics.it/school, registration deadline May 20th.
Also in Italy, there is the Bertinoro International Summer School of Natural Computation – BNC 2008. It is to be held at the University Residential Center – Bertinoro (Forlì-Cesena), Italy, September 20-27, 2008. See the webpage at http://www.dmi.unict.it/~bnc/index.html for details.
Finally, in Porto, there is NN2008, the 2008 summer school on neural networks in classification, regression and data mining. July 7-11, Porto, Portugal. http://www.nn.isep.ipp.pt.
Technorati Tags: summer school, italy, portugal, neural networks, genomics, call for participation
Filed under CFP, chaos, Conference, dynamical systems, evolutionary computing, quantum computing, Self-Organizing Systems by oliver | 0 comments
UC 2008, the Seventh International Conference on Unconventional Computation will take place in Vienna, August 25-28, 2008.
Original papers are solicited in all areas of unconventional computation; typical, but not exclusive, topics are: natural computing including quantum, cellular, molecular, neural, and membrane computing as well as evolutionary paradigms; chaos and dynamical systems based computing; proposals for computations going beyond the Turing model.
Submissions are due on April 14th, 2008. The call for papers and the conference poster are available from the conference homepage.
Technorati Tags: unconventional, evolutionary computing, conference, quantum computing, chaos, cfp, neural computing, dynamical systems
