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Published on: March 11, 2015
Rate-distortion scenario for the emergence and evolution of noisy molecular codes
1Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, IL-76100 Rehovot, Israel.
Abstract:
We discuss, in terms of rate-distortion theory, the fitness of molecular codes as the problem of designing an optimal information channel. The fitness is governed by an interplay between the cost and quality of the channel, which induces smoothness in the code. By incorporating this code fitness into population dynamics models, we suggest that the emergence and evolution of molecular codes may be explained by simple channel design considerations.
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