Excerpt

A remarkable number of fields of science have recently felt the impact of a development in statistical mechanics that began about a decade ago in response to some strange observations on a variety of magnetic alloys of little or no technical importance but of long-recognized scientific interest. These fields are:

• Statistical mechanics itself, both equilibrium and nonequilibrium;

• Computer science, both special algorithms and general theory of complexity;

• Evolutionary biology; and

• Neuroscience, especially brain modeling.

Finally, there are speculations about possible applications to protein structure and function and even to the immune system.

What do these fields have in common? The answer is that in each case the behavior of a system is controlled by a random function of a very large number of variables, that is, a function in a space of which the dimensionality is one of the large, “thermodynamic limit” variables: D → ∞. The first such function of which the properties came to be understood was the model Hamiltonian

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