Talk:Autocatalytic set

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Formal definition has to be improved. Maybe the name for the "generate closure operator" cl should be changed, hmmm.

Dittrich 22:24, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

The section on "Linguistic aspects" is a little bit strange. Especially "no agreed-upon notion of autocatalytic sets exists today", which is true for any term. So the sentence contains little if not no information. The sentence is even misleading, because there is a nice mathematical definition fitting to practically all work that I currently know.

If there are other meanings of "autocatalytic sets", we should add reference to literature.

And we should remove statements that are controversial.

Dittrich 13:17, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

It would be nice to see an example. 139.184.30.135 16:35, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

The definition given on the page doesn't seem to properly capture the notion of an autocatalytic set AFAICS.

For example, let M be {A,B,C} and R be just {A+C -> B+C}. Then all the catalysts in R are in M, but the set can hardly be said to be autocatalytic because C is effectively inert. It would surely be better to say that every catalyst in in R must be a product of a reaction in R.

There should also be a reference to where this definition comes from. It is not the same as the one in the paper that is given as a reference.

Finally, what does "this can be formulated by a closure over a generating subset of M" mean? A more detailed explanation of this would be much appreciated.

139.184.30.132 (talk) 17:09, 31 March 2008 (UTC)