Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators
guardian.co.uk
Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators
#2When this discipline was first starting to kick off I remember a little experiment done to tap into and code the DNA of a particular strain of bacterium (probably similar to this E-coli). In doing so the playful scientists encoded the phrase "I am the riddle of life, solve me!" into junk DNA sections of the organism.... it always made me feel a little queasy thinking about it being found by whatever civilization is around a thousand years from now! What would it do to their fundamental picture of life? I'm sure the same could be said about organic computation. It's an open-ended chaotic system, where really all we control is the initial starting conditions. Who's to know that after we've got our "answer" the continued adaptation leads to something vastly beyond our control/comprehension. I guess it's all part of the "ghost in the machine" paranoia surrounding AI, except these things will not be ghosts and the machine is DNA.....
Re: Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators
#3When this discipline was first starting to kick off I remember a little experiment done to tap into and code the DNA of a particular strain of bacterium (probably similar to this E-coli). In doing so the playful scientists encoded the phrase "I am the riddle of life, solve me!" into junk DNA sections of the organism.... it always made me feel a little queasy thinking about it being found by whatever civilization is a…
To really get your head spinning, what if you used 'strings' on your own dna and you found some interesting ascii segments in there, on 4 billion basepairs the chances of finding something interesting are pretty good ;)
Re: Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators
#4When this discipline was first starting to kick off I remember a little experiment done to tap into and code the DNA of a particular strain of bacterium (probably similar to this E-coli). In doing so the playful scientists encoded the phrase "I am the riddle of life, solve me!" into junk DNA sections of the organism.... it always made me feel a little queasy thinking about it being found by whatever civilization is a…
To really get your head spinning, what if you used 'strings' on your own dna and you found some interesting ascii segments in there, on 4 billion basepairs the chances of finding something interesting are pretty good ;)
But remember, we see faces in clouds. We seem predisposed to bullshit our selves in similar fashion.
Re: Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators
#5My computer can solve TSP on three towns far, far faster. This shows calculations can be done with bacteria, but there's no evidence at all that it will be faster, especially on NPC, even with the extreme parallelism the method implies.
It's typical journalistic hype.
Re: Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators
#6When this discipline was first starting to kick off I remember a little experiment done to tap into and code the DNA of a particular strain of bacterium (probably similar to this E-coli). In doing so the playful scientists encoded the phrase "I am the riddle of life, solve me!" into junk DNA sections of the organism.... it always made me feel a little queasy thinking about it being found by whatever civilization is a…
To really get your head spinning, what if you used 'strings' on your own dna and you found some interesting ascii segments in there, on 4 billion basepairs the chances of finding something interesting are pretty good ;)
Remember that book, The Bible Code? And remember how it worked on any book, such as Moby Dick? Someone should plug the published human genome(s) into it.
Re: Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators
#7When this discipline was first starting to kick off I remember a little experiment done to tap into and code the DNA of a particular strain of bacterium (probably similar to this E-coli). In doing so the playful scientists encoded the phrase "I am the riddle of life, solve me!" into junk DNA sections of the organism.... it always made me feel a little queasy thinking about it being found by whatever civilization is a…
In a thousand years, with no selective pressure to preserve it, the phrase would mutate beyond recognition and probably be deleted altogether.
Re: Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators
#8When this discipline was first starting to kick off I remember a little experiment done to tap into and code the DNA of a particular strain of bacterium (probably similar to this E-coli). In doing so the playful scientists encoded the phrase "I am the riddle of life, solve me!" into junk DNA sections of the organism.... it always made me feel a little queasy thinking about it being found by whatever civilization is a…
To really get your head spinning, what if you used 'strings' on your own dna and you found some interesting ascii segments in there, on 4 billion basepairs the chances of finding something interesting are pretty good ;)
Similar "logic" has inspired a number of scientists to attempt to "decode" the background microwave radiation of the universe as it has the capacity to hold the first act of Romeo and Juliet (dunno how many bits of information that comes too) ... but the idea was that IF a creator wanted to leave a message that could be found by any significantly technologically advanced organism, this would be the best place to shove it
But like another poster said - we are pattern recognition machines. Coincidences, faces, conspiracies and their ilk just leap to the forefront of our attention.... I wonder if their couldn't be a little bit of this phenomena at work in this study? Not read enough of the primary material to see if it's something they've consciously tried to factor out of the experiments
Re: Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators
#9My computer can solve TSP on three towns far, far faster. This shows calculations can be done with bacteria, but there's no evidence at all that it will be faster, especially on NPC, even with the extreme parallelism the method implies. It's typical journalistic hype.
indeed, I don't doubt that once we can do parallelism on par with the biological world in neural network models (which are probably already available or being researched) many of these studies will be thought of as ill considered funding streams. Not so sure about chemical processors - I still expect the pay off from this research to be fantastically beneficial for all sorts of domains.
Re: Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
To really get your head spinning, what if you used 'strings' on your own dna and you found some interesting ascii segments in there, on 4 billion basepairs the chances of finding something interesting are pretty good ;)
Remember that book, The Bible Code? And remember how it worked on any book, such as Moby Dick? Someone should plug the published human genome(s) into it.
see 'a beautiful mind'.
We are pattern recognizers, feed us random noise and we'll see patterns.
DNA is not exactly random noise, but for this purpose it is probably close enough.