Category: Pop. Genetics

Summary: Finding how much directional exchange asymmetry a compartment-protected hypercycle can tolerate before its localized growth mode stops staying confined.

Compartmentalized hypercycles are a classic origin-of-life idea for protecting cooperative replicators from parasites and dilution. This experiment asks when that protection breaks down if exchange between compartments becomes strongly directional rather than balanced.

The model studies dense Jacobian operators for compartmentalized hypercycles under fixed parasite pressure and uses GPU eigensolves with iterative deepening to bisect the exchange-asymmetry parameter. The threshold is defined by the point where a parasite-resilient localized growth mode ceases to remain concentrated inside the protective compartment structure.

That makes the experiment a quantitative test of how much transport asymmetry early cooperative systems could tolerate. It separates the benefits of compartmentalization itself from the costs of strongly biased exchange between compartments.

Method: GPU dense Jacobian eigensolve with iterative deepening and bisection on directional exchange asymmetry at fixed parasite pressure.

What is measured: Critical exchange-asymmetry threshold, localization of the protected growth mode, leading spectral stability indicator, and threshold bracket width.