  Being able to measure time, whether directly or indirectly, is a significant
advantage for an organism. It allows for the timely reaction to regular or
predicted events, reducing the pressure for fast processing of sensory input.
Thus, clocks are ubiquitous in biology. In the present paper, we consider
minimal abstract pure clocks in different configurations and investigate their
characteristic dynamics. We are especially interested in optimally
time-resolving clocks. Among these, we find fundamentally diametral clock
characteristics, such as oscillatory behavior for purely local time measurement
or decay-based clocks measuring time periods of a scale global to the problem.
We include also sets of independent clocks ("clock bags"), sequential cascades
of clocks and composite clocks with controlled dependency. Clock cascades show
a "condensation effect" and the composite clock shows various regimes of
markedly different dynamics.
