The ACT 2018 “Best paper prize” is jointly awarded to:
– Biochemical coupling through emergent conservation laws, by John C Baez, Blake S Pollard, Jonathan Lorand, and Maru Sarazola
– Translating and Evolving: Towards a Model of Language Change in DisCoCat, by Tai-Danae Bradley, Martha Lewis, Jade Master, and Brad Theilman
The paper by Baez’s group gives an introduction to Bahzin’s work on the role of ATP in coupling, in which he discussed the importance of quasiequilibrium states for coupling to occur. Further, the authors explain how coupling relies on emergent conservation laws. We think that the paper makes a nice addition to the literature, giving both a very good introduction to this area of biochemistry from an open systems perspective, and laying the groundwork for a potential categorical understanding.
The paper by Lewis’s group addresses an important problem in the distributive, compositional, categorical modelling of languages, namely the translation between languages. While some results and definitions are still preliminary, the authors are ambitious in their application of category theory, and their ideas provide novel ways to think about this unsolved problem.
We believe that these two papers demonstrate, in complementary ways, commendable progress over the two month submission window, and are deserving joint awardees of the prize.