Computational Mechanics: Where It’s Been and Where It’s Going

The field of computational mechanics, the study of causal states that started around 1990, has grown tremendously in the last decade or so. The calculus of epsilon-Machines, both classical and quantum, has been nearly fully mapped-out. Practitioners are applying these techniques to biological, chemical, thermodynamic, and artificial intelligence, with many more applications to come. Some practitioners are interested in benchmarking systems, while others are interested in understanding the causal structure of those systems—or both.

What remains? This is what we intend to discuss. We hope to spend the SFI Micro Working Group preparing a high-profile review of computational mechanics for a physics audience that preferentially still uses order-R Markov models rather than infinite-order Markov models for their processes despite what they could be doing. As part of that endeavor, we will discuss and predict where the field is headed.