Assembly Theory

has been developed to explore the extrinsic information required to distinguish a given object from a random ensemble.

Objects with a high assembly index can be uniquely identified as those that must have been produced using directed biological or technological processes rather than purely random processes. pdf

The development of the assembly index was motivated by the desire to define a biological threshold, such that any object found in abundance with an assembly index above the threshold would have required the intervention of one or more biological processes to form. The assembly index of an object is the length of the shortest pathway to construct the object starting from its basic building blocks. It should be noted that this approach is entirely classical, allowing the quantification of pathways through assembly space probabilistically as a way to understand what life does.

The selection process is defined by a transition from undirected to directed exploration. Undirected exploration leads to the fast homogeneous expansion of discovered objects in the assembly space, while directed exploration leads to a process more like a depth first search. pdf

Designing Arithmetic Circuits with Deep Reinforcement Learning. nvidia

Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution. nature