Chen Yiing-Rei, Lee Chi-Lun
Department of Physics, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei 11677, Taiwan.
Department of Physics, National Central University, Jhongli 32001, Taiwan.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2014 Jan;89(1):012815. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.89.012815. Epub 2014 Jan 29.
What if we played the Rubik's cube game by simple intuition? We would rotate the cube, probably in the hope of getting a more organized pattern in each next step. Yet frustration occurs easily, and we soon find ourselves trapped as the game progresses no further. Played in this completely strategy-less style, the entire problem of the Rubik's cube game can be compared to that of complex chemical reactions such as protein folding, only with less guidance in the searching process. In this work we look into this random-searching process by means of thermodynamics and compare the game's dynamics with that of a faithful stochastic model constructed from the statistical energy landscape theory (SELT). This comparison reveals the peculiar nature of SELT, which relies on the random energy approximation and often chops up energy correlations among nearby configurations. Our observation provides a general insight for the use of SELT in the studies of these frustrated systems.
如果我们仅凭简单的直觉来玩魔方游戏会怎样呢？我们会转动魔方，大概是希望在每下一步中得到一种更规整的图案。然而，挫败感很容易出现，而且随着游戏不再有进展，我们很快就会发现自己陷入困境。以这种完全没有策略的方式玩，魔方游戏的整个问题可以与诸如蛋白质折叠等复杂化学反应的问题相比较，只是在搜索过程中得到的指导更少。在这项工作中，我们借助热力学来研究这个随机搜索过程，并将游戏的动力学与基于统计能量景观理论（SELT）构建的忠实随机模型的动力学进行比较。这种比较揭示了SELT的独特性质，它依赖于随机能量近似，并且常常切断附近构型之间的能量关联。我们的观察为在这些受挫系统的研究中使用SELT提供了一个总体的见解。
