MONTE-CARLO SIMULATION OF ISING-LIKE IMMUNOLOGICAL SHAPE SPACE

The high-dimensional shape space for the antibodies of the immune system is simulated with an Ising-like interaction. However, instead of the molecular field being linear in the sum of the neighbor spins, we take it as quadratic and negative. In this way the bell-shaped response curve of biological immune systems is approximated, as a probabilistic generalization of window automata. We find phase transitions only in five and more dimensions, not in two to four, for nearest-neighbor interactions.