Re: Complexity Explorer

Posted by Russ Abbott on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Complexity-Explorer-tp7586215p7586216.html

Although I haven't gone through the MaxEnt tutorial I have a question if anyone would be willing to think about it.

As I understand it, one aspect of MaxEnt says that nature chooses that path that maximizes entropy production -- and that satisfies whatever constraints exist. (Or something like that. I don't claim to know enough about it to say anything definitive.) Yet when I think about the earth and the way it deals with the energy it gets from the sun, it seems to me that the biosphere "does its best" to minimize the rate of entropy production. 

If there were no life on earth, all the sun's energy would be quickly radiated back into space, mostly as heat and some as reflected light. That seems like the fastest way to dissipate the sun's energy and produce entropy.

With life on earth the sun's energy is absorbed and "exploited" to the maximum extent possible. That's what life does; it looks for and fills unexploited energy niches. Eventually the remaining energy is radiated back as heat. So that would seem to slow entropy production.

Even more telling, much of the sun's energy is stored on earth as energy-rich organic material left over biological organisms die. So some of the sun's energy is never sent back to space -- until that stuff is burned. So that would reduce the rate of entropy production even further.

Is this a reasonable way of looking at what happens? Is this inconsistent with the notion of MaxEnt? Or am I misunderstanding something?

-- Russ

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 10:08 AM Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

SFI's Complexity Explorer project surprised me recently when I discovered how far they had gotten:

    http://www.complexityexplorer.org/

(I discovered this following Melanie Mitchell on twitter)

​I get periodic posts from them that may be of interest:

http://www.complexityexplorer.org/news/21-simon-dedeo-talks-about-his-maxent-tutorial

Simon DeDeo talks about his "MaxEnt" tutorial

In this post we interview Simon DeDeo, the instructor for our new Mathematics tutorial on “Maximum Entropy Methods”. Simon is an Assistant Professor in Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.  He is affiliated with the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and also with Indiana University’s Cognitive Science Program. We asked Simon to tell us a little bit more about what Maximum Entropy Methods are good for.

​   -- Owen​

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