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Formal Systems in Biology

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Re: Formal Systems in Biology

#11
post #3

I was wondering if there was any work in the field of evolving 'creatures' moving in a virtual space, beyond what Karl Sims did 23 years ago. https://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html https://www.karlsims.com/galapagos/index.html It would be nice if Karl Sims could open source it as it is really inspiring visual example in the field of Artificial Life, next to seeing the generations of metuselahs unfold…

Colleagues in my research group are working on evolving 'creatures' in physical space, e.g. evolvable robots [0]. They address deep questions regarding the interplay between evolution/the body, learning/the brain and the environment using evolutionary algorithms and machine learning.

[0] https://www.york.ac.uk/robot-lab/are/

Re: Formal Systems in Biology

#13
The first entry on this list is McCulloch-Pitts nerve nets whose expressive power were analysed by S.C. Kleene [1]. In his article he coined the term "regular events" for the class of languages that could be expressed by nerve nets/finite automata, and this is where regular expressions got their name from. If you have ever thought the name was strange, rest assured that Kleene didn't actually like it either, he just couldn't think of something better at the time:

  > We shall presently describe a class of events which we will call "regular events" (We would welcome any suggestions as to a more descriptive term.*)
  > [...]
  > * McCulloch and Pitts use the term "prehensible," introduced rather differently; but since we did not understand their definition, we did not adopt the term.
So, had McCulloch and Pitts been a bit clearer in their seminal paper, then maybe it would have been called "prehensible expressions" :).

[1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand...

Re: Formal Systems in Biology

#15
This maybe a rudimentary question, but if someone was going to study this at a university level, what would they study?

I ask because I'm starting my masters in CS, but I've also been going to workshops/events at a local citizen bio lab and really enjoying it. I'd really like to go deeper into the cross-section of CS and Bio, specifically the kinds of things listed in this repo (modeling biological phenomenon as formal systems, using computation to simulate those systems, etc.)

But when I look at potential programs to pursue after my CS course, I get a bit lost in all the different titles—bioinformatics, systems biology, computational biology, etc. It's hard for an outsider in the field to discern any meaningful delineation. Does anyone with experience in the field know what category of study these resources would fall under, from a university perspective?

Re: Formal Systems in Biology

#16
"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

and

"Team Builds the First Living Robots, Tiny 'xenobots' assembled from cells..."

https://www.uvm.edu/uvmnews/news/team-builds-first-living-ro...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22040150

Re: Formal Systems in Biology

#19

This maybe a rudimentary question, but if someone was going to study this at a university level, what would they study? I ask because I'm starting my masters in CS, but I've also been going to workshops/events at a local citizen bio lab and really enjoying it. I'd really like to go deeper into the cross-section of CS and Bio, specifically the kinds of things listed in this repo (modeling biological phenomenon as form…

> bioinformatics, systems biology, computational biology

Of those bioinformatics is more specific (usually genomics data); the other two are overlapping and pretty non-specific terms.

For example I started a Sys Bio PhD and ended up in a Comp Bio research group. A friend started the same way but ended up in control theory/microbiology.

The title and even the department are somewhat arbitrary and more to do with the organisation at the university than anything else (e.g. I was in CS but my friend was Engineering I think).

If you can find a good interdisciplinary course they will be familiar with people moving around depending on their interests.

Re: Formal Systems in Biology

#20

This maybe a rudimentary question, but if someone was going to study this at a university level, what would they study? I ask because I'm starting my masters in CS, but I've also been going to workshops/events at a local citizen bio lab and really enjoying it. I'd really like to go deeper into the cross-section of CS and Bio, specifically the kinds of things listed in this repo (modeling biological phenomenon as form…

A lot of the stuff in the repo is pretty marginal, from the point of view of mainstream molecular/cell/developmental biology, so i don't think there is a reliable systematic way to find it.

In particular, that repo collects what are basically discrete maths approaches to biology: representing living things as systems of symbols rather than differential equations. I have always found that approach intuitively appealing - something about biological robustness meaning you have an opportunity to ignore a load of quantitative details and focus on the underlying structure. But in twenty-five years of being vaguely interested in it, i have never seen a really productive application of that approach, outside of treating DNA as a string of symbols.

Still, perhaps 'marginal' is just another way of saying 'cutting-edge'. I think it's most likely to show up in elite research institutes where people can do slightly out-there stuff, or in explicitly cross-disciplinary institutes or programmes.

The specific terms you mention have different meanings to me:

bioinformatics - treating DNA, RNA, and protein sequences as text and applying computation to them, eg searching, phylogeny, structure and function prediction

computational biology - various approaches to simulating cells and tissues, usually involving numerically evaluating differential equations at some level, eg how morphogens cause tissue patterning

computational biophysics - computational chemistry but for large biomolecules, eg simulating how proteins work

systems biology - smoke and mirrors used to obtain grants

But biologists aren't really into rigorous definitions and fixed boundaries, so you might find interesting stuff within any of these.

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