Non-equilibrium Dynamics and Computation

Harvard FAS

This course develops a theoretical framework for understanding non-equilibrium dynamical systems in terms of the computation realized by their dynamics. We focus primarily on classical non-equilibrium many-body systems, asking how dynamical properties, such as chaos, integrability, topology, and symmetry, determine what kinds of computation a system can perform, from finite state machines and pushdown automata to Turing-universal computation. We arrive at a classification of non-equilibrium…