The QQRONA software suite

QQRONASynth – QQRONA ideas in action

Although QQRONA's concepts and philosophy are valuable in their own right, its most obvious, and concrete, benefit lies in the software suite QQRONASynth (QS). QS provides:

• A simulation of an analogue computing environment for running QQRONA models

• A programming paradigm for running the models in this environment

• An extensive development toolkit to design, build, test, tune and execute models

How is a QQRONA model developed?

The QQRONASynth Toolkit (QST) offers a suite of tools for managing QQRONA models:

• An interactive graphical interface allows a user to view circuits, sub-circuits and qcells, in both schema form and as tables of numeric configuration parameters

• Environment harnesses to control external inputs to the models, and monitor its outputs

• Experimental controls to define how the model is run (see below) and the tests that are applied to it

• Tuning strategies to refine each qcell’s configuration parameters to provide the desired behaviour

Alongside these software tools, QQRONA offers an analysis method to help in the breakdown of complex behaviours into their constituent behavioural elements, which can be implemented as individual qcells or circuits.

Who can use QQRONA models ?

QQRONA is intended for use by anyone interested in understanding, analysing, modelling, simulating or synthesising natural behaviours, whether for personal, professional, teaching or research purposes.

• In education, QQRONA provides an exciting and informative new way to explain hard to understand concepts in a range of disciplines. The examples provided on this site show how an explanatory model can be built to show the overall behaviour of part of an organism while simultaneously observing underlying behaviours at circuit or cell level. Users can zoom in and zoom out while the model runs, as well as speed it up or slow it down.

• In research, QQRONA offers an "in virtuo" complement to other experimental methods such as in vivo and in vitro. Once a QQRONA model has been built and tuned to reproduce the results of a live experiment, it can be run again at will, at any running speed the user chooses. The model's configuration parameters may be adjusted in flight to simulate real world changes (eg varying cytoplasmic ion or protein concentrations) and the results observed in real time.

• In many professions, there is a need to build models to reflect real world behaviours - social, economic or psychological. QQRONA provides a radical new approach, with an easy to use interface and development toolkit, along with the ability to be tuned to match observed data.

• For anyone else who has an interest in observing, modelling and understanding the world they live in - or inventing a new world to live in - QQRONA offers an easy to use and fun way to put models together and into action

What is a QQRONA model?

QQRONA allows behaviours of any complexity to be modelled using standard, repeatable elements (QQRONA cells, or “qcells”) to be plugged together like building bricks. All qcells are essentially the same, but each is configured using numeric values to define the precise nature of their behaviour. Qcells are autonomous – in traditional computing terms, they act as both “data” and “program”, and require no central processing control. Hence QQRONA models can be expanded indefinitely.

Qcells are grouped together into circuits that can perform specific functions, and circuits are grouped into larger circuits, and so on, indefinitely.