Complexity

Research Article

Prebiotic Geochemical Automata at the Intersection of Radiolytic Chemistry, Physical Complexity, and Systems Biology

Table 1

Hierarchically compounded components and instruction levels recognizable in most modern computers, with object levels and characteristic time scales of operation in seconds. Adapted from Brown et al. [47] and Denning [48].


Level	Name	Objects (characteristic time scale)

15	Workflow process	Cross-platform instructions and applications (10⁵)
14	User interface	Machine operating systems (10³)
13	User virtual machine	User machine displays (10¹)
12	Directories	Directories (10⁻¹)
11	I/O streams	Input/output data (10⁻²)
10	Devices	External devices (10⁻²)
9	File system	Files (10⁻²)
8	Interprocess communication	Pipes (10⁻²)
7	Virtual memory	Memory segments (10⁻²)
6	Local secondary storage	Blocks of data (10⁻³)
5	Processes and semaphores	Primitive processes, semaphores, ready list (10⁻⁴)
4	Interrupts	Fault handling programs (10⁻⁵)
3	Procedures	Procedure segments, call stack, display (10⁻⁶)
2	Instruction set	Evaluation stack, scalar data, array data (10⁻⁸)
1	Random access memory (RAM)	Short-term memory elements (10⁻⁸)
0	Electronic circuits	Registers, gates, buses, and so forth (10⁻¹²)