Definition of "variational" []

• Of, pertaining to, or caused by variation (adjective)

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• "This information measure, herein dubbed the variational information, meaningfully assigns a numerical bit-value to arbitrary state transitions of physical systems."
• ""Anytime you see some kind of variational depth in a rock like this, you interpret it to mean there is some kind of chemical alteration that has taken place since the rock was first exposed on the surface," Squyres explained."
• "I suspect there is some extremal principle here, where the tuning is some variational principle on a partition function which results in a greatest upper bound on the measure of complexity which can exist in a local region."