Life as Evolving Software, Greg Chaitin at PPGC UFRGS

Few people remember Turing's work on pattern formation in biology (morphogenesis), but Turing's famous 1936 paper On Computable Numbers exerted an immense influence on the birth of molecular biology indirectly, through the work of John von Neumann on self-reproducing automata, which influenced Sydney Brenner who in turn influenced Francis Crick, the Crick of Watson and Crick, the discoverers of the molecular structure of DNA. Furthermore, von Neumann's application of Turing's ideas to biology is beautifully supported by recent work on evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology). The crucial idea: DNA is multi-billion year old software, but we could not recognize it as such before Turing's 1936 paper, which according to von Neumann creates the idea of computer hardware and software.

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  Education

[TheMarcusrobbins]

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;—

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems.

[Nick Santoianni]

@gjchaitin I read your book!!! It's awesome I really enjoyed learning about your theory, I'm a construction worker but I LOVE biology, I didn't think math and bio would ever make a lot of sense but surprisingly it does, really opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking great job!

[ler523]

So, is the World an evolving software as well? That's why we can never know it, because the World as a whole final and perfect piece with static laws doesn't exist. It's on the move forever as well as math?!

[gjchaitin]

For an expanded version of this lecture, please see my little book "Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical" published by Pantheon in May of 2012.

[65nom]

evolution too slow argument - For a single mathematical organism sure..

Now remember that there's parallelism.. and sex, so take a billion bitstreams each with a random mutation, and also allow them to combine results.. (sex)

make it perfect sex, so allow a function to xor two programs and pick the best permutation.. perhaps with some limit say no more than 8 bits of difference.. so 256 "children" leads to speciation... when progs too incompatible !