Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-letter genetic code

sciencealert.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 152 posts

Re: New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-letter genetic code

#111

Post by zeta0134 »

an-honest-moose wrote: post #93
AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that any organism is inherently open source, just not necessarily free and open source.

By that logic you could argue that software is inherently open source.

As the reverse engineering communities will be glad to tell you, software basically is open source. It must eventually be decoded into instructions to run on a processor, and while it's not impossible to fully sign / encrypt the binary blobs before they are run, it is practically not worried about for most applications. Without using specialized hardware, you can at best obfuscate your code, but you cannot make it impossible to eventually disassemble and understand.

Assume your code will be disassembled at some point by a bad actor. Don't assume that any code distributed to a client is safe or trustworthy, and expect that any data, methods, or secrets contained in that code are now public knowledge. To secure your environment systems under any other assumption is a dangerous falsehood.

Re: New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-letter genetic code

#112

Post by fatboy93 »

_yosefk wrote: post #40
_throwaway1843 wrote: post #8

Star Trek depicted one of the scarier applications of such a technology: There, The Jem'Hadaar are a genetically engineered race of warriors controlled by the Dominion, who exert power over them by being the sole provider of a substance (Ketracel-White) that they need in order to survive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Star_Trek) http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ketracel-white If my reading of the paper is…

It's good as long self-termination is a nice-to-have feature. If you REALLY want them to self-terminate but you found out that they mutated and can now synthesize X & Y, you're in trouble. Genetically modified organisms are a bit scary, but genetically modified organisms that replicate autonomously are more than a bit scary. As programmers - a profession that managed to spread Shellshock, the dumbest imaginable backd…

> It's good as long self-termination is a nice-to-have feature. If you REALLY want them to self-terminate but you found out that they mutated and can now synthesize X & Y, you're in trouble.

That's the premise of Jurassic Park 1, except with an amino acid.

Re: New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-letter genetic code

#113

Post by Retric »

portent wrote: post #76
klibertp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the argument is that I could know, pretty exactly, not only when (or if) this piece of code terminates, but also how much iterations it's going to take. Sure, it's much easier (in this case) to simply run the thing, experiment with some tweaks a bit and come to some conclusion (like biologists supposedly do?). But I could also go read CPython (assuming CPython) implementation of floating point arithmetic…

What you are saying sounds intuitively true, but the mathematics of Chaos Theory showed that it is not actually the case. What my code snippet is doing is running a sample of a particular chaotic function that was originally inspired by biology (a simple predator/prey model). Ultimately, what happens is that you just cannot predict how the function will behave - it is chaotic. Ultimately most complex systems start to…

No, virtually is the important bit. In code we can know all the details. So, you can predict the code just fine. For example running it twice and getting the same output the second time. Chaos theory is based on real world systems that can't be measured accurately. However, internal computer simulations don't have that limitation.

One example is if you try saving a simulation to disk you need to copy all internal state or you get a different output.

Re: New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-letter genetic code

#114

Post by DiabloD3 »

andai wrote: post #30
MiddleEndian wrote: post #2

Very interesting. I like how about half the article was about reassurance that this won't lead to out of control monsters. Along with the recent article about pig embryos, I wonder if the not-too-distant future will lead to bizarre custom pets, like something out of the Spore video game.

When I was very young I spoke with a man who informed me in no uncertain terms that the digital age was old news and the next big thing would be bio-entertainment.

I'm not sure if that refers to highly customized psychoactive drugs... or prostitution.

Re: New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-letter genetic code

#115

Post by PhasmaFelis »

stcredzero wrote: post #68
_yosefk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good as long self-termination is a nice-to-have feature. If you REALLY want them to self-terminate but you found out that they mutated and can now synthesize X & Y, you're in trouble. Genetically modified organisms are a bit scary, but genetically modified organisms that replicate autonomously are more than a bit scary. As programmers - a profession that managed to spread Shellshock, the dumbest imaginable backd…

We have no idea what happens in our own code, code that we copy from place to place ourselves, written in languages we designed and running on machines we designed, and there's nothing like mutation and self-replication with this stuff, for the most part. Documented: Computer viruses mutating in the wild by two different viruses accidentally copying themselves into overlapping regions of memory.

Interesting. When has that happened? It seems awfully unlikely to create "viable offspring" that way, but I suppose most biological mutations are neutral or negative as well...

Re: New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-letter genetic code

#116

Post by zepto »

tstactplsignore wrote: post #102
zepto wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nothing but an appeal to authority. To suggest that accurately gauging the limits of our current knowledge about biological systems is 'anti-scientific' or 'anti-intellectual' goes against everything science stands for, and firmly crosses the line into blind scientism. It remains absolutely true that we understand the software systems we build far better than we understand the biological systems that we are i…

> This is nothing but an appeal to authority. Again, the original analogy is perfect because the same statement could be made by the hypothetical "anti-software" person - this person could say "You're just appealing to the authority of these computer scientists! They don't know everything, software bugs happen all of the time!" >To suggest that accurately gauging the limits of our current knowledge about biological s…

I think you are mistaking me for someone who is anti-biotech, and your response is more about that than about what I actually wrote.

I'm not anti-biotech. I'm against using the spurious analogy with software as a way to establish risk levels. I do think that it's an anti-scientific argument, and frankly one that undermines your cause.

If as you say, only experts in biotech are in a position to understand that the risk level is similar to the software case, this proves my point because it means that the analogy is just a way of conveying the opinions of those experts without being open it.

Re: New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-letter genetic code

#117

Post by BraveNewCurency »

Retric wrote: post #113
portent wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are saying sounds intuitively true, but the mathematics of Chaos Theory showed that it is not actually the case. What my code snippet is doing is running a sample of a particular chaotic function that was originally inspired by biology (a simple predator/prey model). Ultimately, what happens is that you just cannot predict how the function will behave - it is chaotic. Ultimately most complex systems start to…

No, virtually is the important bit. In code we can know all the details. So, you can predict the code just fine. For example running it twice and getting the same output the second time. Chaos theory is based on real world systems that can't be measured accurately. However, internal computer simulations don't have that limitation. One example is if you try saving a simulation to disk you need to copy all internal sta…

No, the parent is actually talking about the Halting Problem. It has been proven impossible to predict when a program will exit without actually executing the program. (except in a few trivial edge cases)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Re: New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-letter genetic code

#118

Post by BraveNewCurency »

joshjje wrote: post #54
portent wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, well we can always say that the heat-death of the universe renders all problems irrelevent, but it's a bit of a cheat in my opinion. The original poster seems to imply that knowing the code means that you can know the behaviour of the system; I do not think that is the case, and my simple (chaotic) example tries to demonstrate this.

If you have the compiled assembly obviously you can say exactly what will happen. I agree with your meaning somewhat though that more often than not many people have no clue, especially with large systems. Its not as bad as your statement though..

No, the parent is actually talking about the Halting Problem. It has been proven impossible to predict when a program will exit without actually executing the program. (except in a few trivial edge cases)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Re: New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-letter genetic code

#119

Post by andrepd »

Retric wrote: post #113
portent wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are saying sounds intuitively true, but the mathematics of Chaos Theory showed that it is not actually the case. What my code snippet is doing is running a sample of a particular chaotic function that was originally inspired by biology (a simple predator/prey model). Ultimately, what happens is that you just cannot predict how the function will behave - it is chaotic. Ultimately most complex systems start to…

No, virtually is the important bit. In code we can know all the details. So, you can predict the code just fine. For example running it twice and getting the same output the second time. Chaos theory is based on real world systems that can't be measured accurately. However, internal computer simulations don't have that limitation. One example is if you try saving a simulation to disk you need to copy all internal sta…

No, I don't think you quite get it. What OP meant, in more rigorous terms, is: write me a function that takes "b" as an argument and returns whether the function will terminate or not when I replace 3.59 with "b". As it turns out, this is not at all simple. But you don't even need to go there. For some values of "b", the program doesn't terminate, and it's not trivial to show it. What are you going to do? Run the program forever? You can never prove it won't terminate in the next iteration.

Re: New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-letter genetic code

#120

Post by darkmighty »

Retric wrote: post #113
portent wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are saying sounds intuitively true, but the mathematics of Chaos Theory showed that it is not actually the case. What my code snippet is doing is running a sample of a particular chaotic function that was originally inspired by biology (a simple predator/prey model). Ultimately, what happens is that you just cannot predict how the function will behave - it is chaotic. Ultimately most complex systems start to…

No, virtually is the important bit. In code we can know all the details. So, you can predict the code just fine. For example running it twice and getting the same output the second time. Chaos theory is based on real world systems that can't be measured accurately. However, internal computer simulations don't have that limitation. One example is if you try saving a simulation to disk you need to copy all internal sta…

What about the following?

  x=5
  y=5
  while True:
    if y%2 == 0:
      y=y/2
    else:
      y=3y+1
    if y == 1:
      x=x+1
      y=x
    if y==x:
      return x
Please predict the code. I'll even give you $500 in memory of some guy named Erdos if you get it right (and I haven't even gone for a provably undecidable example! :) )

PS: Don't waste time checking x values less than 1000000000000000000

Post reply on HN