Atom as an Agent: Emergent Order by Collective Predictive Coding

Abstract

What is the intrinsic reason of emergence of macroscopic order parameter out of microscopic systems? In this article, we apply to physics the collective predictive coding (CPC), the theory of language/symbol emergence. As our language emerges out of our human communications, physical macroscopic order parameter emerges out of communications among atoms --- each atom is regarded as an agent who predicts each other's behavior through inference. We present three examples of classical spin systems: two-dimensional ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic Ising models, a two-dimensional spin model with competing stripe orders, and the fully connected Sherrington--Kirkpatrick spin-glass model. In all of these examples, proper macroscopic order parameters including the replica overlap emerge automatically through communication informatics of CPC, only from observed spin configurations. We call the learned macroscopic coordinate the collective predictive order. Furthermore, for the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic Ising models, the equilibrium distribution of the collective predictive order yields an emergent potential with the symmetry and thermal evolution characteristic of a Landau potential. Notably, the emergence of the collective predictive order does not refer to any structure of microscopic Hamiltonians/Lagrangians. Thus our ``Atom-as-an-Agent" (AaaA) principle offers a completely data-driven method for the emergence of macroscopic order, that is, machine learning physics.