ReviewNPJ systems biology and applications2024
On the salient limitations of the methods of assembly theory and their classification of molecular biosignatures.
Review in NPJ systems biology and applications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- SuperARC: a test for artificial superintelligence based on compressed modelling, recursive prediction and problem complexity.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A Metric for the Entropic Purpose of a System.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Assembly theory and its relationship with computational complexity.Npj complexity · 2025Article
- Autocatalytic Sets and Assembly Theory: A Toy Model Perspective.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Assembly Theory: What It Does and What It Does Not Do.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- Molecular assembly indices of mineral heteropolyanions: some abiotic molecules are as complex as large biomolecules.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Patterns Lead the Way to Far-from-Equilibrium Materials.ACS physical chemistry Au · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
We demonstrate that the assembly pathway method underlying assembly theory (AT) is an encoding scheme widely used by popular statistical compression algorithms. We show that in all cases (synthetic or natural) AT performs similarly to other simple coding schemes and underperforms compared to system-related indexes based upon algorithmic probability that take into account statistical repetitions but also the likelihood of other computable patterns. Our results imply that the assembly index does not offer substantial improvements over existing methods, including traditional statistical ones, and imply that the separation between living and non-living compounds following these methods has been reported before.
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