2025/09/12 by Qianyang Chen, Chen, Qianyang, Nihat Ay +3
Physics and Astronomy · #68T05 #82B20 #82B27 #94A17 #Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO) #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #I.2.11
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.10102
openalex publication_date 2025/09/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Self-organizing systems consume energy to generate internal order. The concept of thermodynamic efficiency, drawing from statistical physics and information theory, has previously been proposed to characterize a change in control parameter by relating the resulting predictability gain to the required amount of work. However, previous studies have taken a system-centric perspective and considered only single control parameters. Here, we generalize thermodynamic efficiency to multi-parameter settings and derive two observer-centric formulations. The first, an inferential form, relates efficiency to fluctuations of macroscopic observables, interpreting thermodynamic efficiency in terms of how well the system parameters can be inferred from observable macroscopic behaviour. The second, an information-geometric form, expresses efficiency in terms of the Fisher information matrix, interpreting it with respect to how difficult it is to navigate the statistical manifold defined by the control protocol. This observer-centric perspective is contrasted with the existing system-centric view, where efficiency is considered an intrinsic property of the system.