Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital...




Comment on Craig Venter's comment on AI within the video:   The delicacy of computer programs, is a valid criticism .  But it is not like biology itself is entirely immune from errors that effectively crash or kill the organism.   There are lethal mutations that impede viability, and even viable organisms once grown can still accumulate errors and develop cancer resulting in death.   Cancer immunity and anticancer mechanisms keep lethality of error accumulation at bay, similarly software can be made to tolerate and recuperate from errors that would otherwise be fatal, within a stably coded simulation the elements within can follow rules allowing for arbitrary evolution.

So all in all I would say that while computer code tends to be a bit more delicate and less error tolerant than biological systems, that need not necessarily be the case, and systems can be made that are far more robust and able to handle the eventualilty of errors,  programs such as genetic algorithms show that evolutionary like change is possible, which is what I think was being implied might not be possible due to the delicate nature of the system.

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