"Alan Turing and John von Neumann saw it early: the logic of life and the logic of code may be one and the same"
Name two people who can out-think me even though they're dead.
(a long list, I know. trust me, I know)
From the MIT Press Reader:
Is Life a Form of Computation?
In 1994, a strange, pixelated machine came to life on a computer screen.
It read a string of instructions, copied them, and built a clone of
itself — just as the Hungarian-American Polymath John von Neumann had
predicted half a century earlier. It was a striking demonstration of a
profound idea: that life, at its core, might be computational.
Although this is seldom fully appreciated, von Neumann was one of the
first to establish a deep link between life and computation.
Reproduction, like computation, he showed, could be carried out by
machines following coded instructions. In his model, based on Alan
Turing’s Universal Machine, self-replicating systems read and execute
instructions much like DNA does: “if the next instruction is the codon CGA, then add an arginine to the protein under construction.” It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a “program” — that is literally the case.
Of
course, there are meaningful differences between biological computing
and the kind of digital computing done by a personal computer or your
smartphone. DNA is subtle and multilayered, including phenomena like
epigenetics and gene proximity effects. Cellular DNA is nowhere near the
whole story, either. Our bodies contain (and continually swap)
countless bacteria and viruses, each running their own code.
It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a “program” — that is literally the case.
Biological computing is “massively parallel,” decentralized, and noisy. Your cells have somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 quintillion ribosomes,
all working at the same time. Each of these exquisitely complex
floating protein factories is, in effect, a tiny computer — albeit a
stochastic one, meaning not entirely predictable. The movements of
hinged components, the capture and release of smaller molecules, and the
manipulation of chemical bonds are all individually random, reversible,
and inexact, driven this way and that by constant thermal buffeting.
Only a statistical asymmetry favors one direction over another, with
clever origami moves tending to “lock in” certain steps such that a next
step becomes likely to happen.
This differs greatly from the
operation of “logic gates” in a computer, basic components that process
binary inputs into outputs using fixed rules. They are irreversible and
engineered to be 99.99 percent reliable and reproducible.
Biological computing is computing, nonetheless. And its use of randomness is a feature, not a bug....
