I was in the conference ‘Statistical Mechanics of Distributed Information Systems‘ in Finland last week, which (for my surprise) was sunny and warm, very different from Birmingham. Slides of the talks as well as references and papers can be found in the conference’s site.
A lot of famous people in the area were there. For instance, Marc Mezard gave a nice talk entirely on the blackboard about how to go from Belief Propagation to Survey Propagation. John Hertz was one of the organizers, but he didn’t give any talk. Again, the list of participants is in the webpage.
The given talks can be arranged in three big areas: computer science and biology with some small deviations (like economics and game theory, being the former basically analysed from the point of view of the later) and interconnections. W.r.t. biology, some of the talks where about algotrithms and others about models. It seems clear that Statistical Mechanics (SM) is gaining confidence with biologists and physicians finally. Among the topics were stochastic models for cell differentiation, the popular theme of information transfer and processing in the genetic code and philogenetic threes.
In the computer science area, the main topics were coding theory and satisfiability problems. Indeed, I saw the phase dagram of the satisfiability problem even in a talk about economics and it appeared so many times during the conference that I think I can reproduce it by heart now.
The concept of agents seems to be a pretty unifying concept in this area, although it is more or less the same as the concept of an interacting body, or entity. It is obly more fashionable. To be fair, I guess that the term ‘agent’ has the advantage of transmitting the idea of some entity which can change its response, which in this context can be viewed as more general than body. For instance, the talk about swarms of agents is an example of the term ‘body’ do not fit so well.
What is still lacking is fundamental physics applications of the methods or at least an interest of bringing the communities together. I personally do not know of any meeting where both topics are entangled. Anyway, it was a nice conference and if you browse the conference’s website you will have an idea about the main tendencies in the area.
