The Conservation of Energy plays a pivotal part in the development of the physical sciences. With the growth of computation and the study of other discrete token based systems such as the genome, it is useful to ask if there are conservation principles which apply to such systems and what kind of functional behaviour they imply for such systems. Here I propose that the Conservation of Hartley-Shannon Information plays the same over-arching role in discrete token based systems as the Conservation of Energy does in physical systems. I will go on to prove that this implies power-law behaviour in component sizes in software systems no matter what they do or how they were built, and also implies the constancy of average gene length in biological systems as reported for example by Lin Xu et al (10.1093/molbev/msk019). These propositions are supported by very large amounts of experimental data extending the first presentation of these ideas in Hatton (2011, IFIP / SIAM / NIST Working Conference on Uncertainty Quantification in Scientific Computing, Boulder, August 2011).
翻译:节能在物理科学发展中起着关键作用。随着计算的增长和对诸如基因组等其他离散象征性系统的研究的增加,有必要问一问是否有适用于此类系统的保护原则,以及这些原则对此类系统的功能行为意味着什么。在这里,我提议,节用哈特利-沙农信息在离散象征性系统中发挥与节能系统在物理系统中一样的主导作用。 我会继续证明,这意味着,无论软件系统中组件大小的功率法行为如何或如何建造,也意味着,例如Lin Xu等人(10.1093/molbev/msk019)所报告的生物系统中平均基因长度的耐久性。 这些论点得到了大量实验数据的支持,这些实验数据扩大了在Hatton(2011年,IIP/SIAM/NIST科学计算中不确定性量化问题工作会议,Boulder,2011年8月)。