Chaos, order, and information in the evolution of strings (Q688944)

We have shown that chaos, order, and information are intimately connected in evolution processes and especially in the evolution of strings. On the one hand, chaos and stochastic processes are the only source of new structures and new information in evolution processes. Therefore, any proper theory of evolution processes must be a stochastic theory. On the other hand, evolution processes are creating ordered structures all over the time: chaos creates cosmos. In this general sense, evolution is playing a game on the border between order and chaos. As a special example of our general thesis we have considered strings generated by evolutionary processes. We have shown that the entropy per symbol is one possible appropriate quantity for measuring the degree of order in strings. We have checked the hypothesis that strings produced by evolutionary processes are neither periodic nor chaotic but somehow in between. We have given several examples to illustrate this hypothesis: strings produced by evolutionary games, pieces of DNA, and pieces of music and texts. The general conclusion is that such a general statement cannot be proven on the basis of an empirical analysis. For the calculation of entropies, we need infinite chains of letters, notes, etc. Therefore, the available empirical material that is finite must be extended to infinity by using certain hypotheses.