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First Digital Simulation of an Entire Life Form
An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting on what appears to be the first digital simulation of an entire life form. Researchers created more than a million digital atoms to reverse engineer the satellite tobacco mosaic virus, a relatively simple organism. But is it really a life form? From the article: 'Viruses are tiny bundles of protein and genetic material that straddle the line between life and non-life. Many scientists prefer to call them "particles" because even though they contain RNA or DNA like other lifeforms, they can only replicate inside other living cells.'"
...Symantec/Norton, McAfee, CommandPoint, Crudpuppy, ClamAV, Grisoft and the rest are all preparing signatures, otherwise if this thing gets in the wild it will turn your data into nothing but pond scum... ;P (Aren't there ANY moderators with quirky senses of humor anymore?)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
...We've been able to have viruses on computers for many years now.
And it took 13 days...That's one slow simulation.
"satellite tobacco mosaic virus"
That sounds like the greatest hits of American products, all in one convenient album.
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make install -not war
This might make a cool game. Someone get Will Wright on the phone.
If they can simulate something else than a virus (because I don't think viruses are intelligent) could they by this way obtain intelligence by simulating an intelligent animal?
Of course. It would take an absolutely colossal amount of computing power, but given sufficient resources and a complete understanding of the basic physics and chemistry involved (neither of which we have yet) you could absolutely simulate a living creature, and the simulation would be intelligent. There have been many sci-fi stories that have used this basic concept. In fact I expect the first intelligent machine will attain its intelligence by simulating a living brain (although at a much higher level than individual atoms).
Dude, this is going to blow your mind.
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Very much so - I blow up life forms every day on RTCW.
I think we have to distinguish between 'life' as a concept and 'living organisms'. Life is an abstraction - it is the 'quality' that is common to all life processes, ie the processes that we know from living organisms.
The only thing that is reasonably clearly defined is 'living orgnism'; and as several posts have already pointed out, viruses can't quite be called living organisms; not because the don't display life, but because they are too simply to qualify as organisms. However, they do have life proceses - eg. they reproduce.
How can one define the concept 'life'? It is a difficult one - there are many that feel it would be too narrow to define it simply as the set of chemical processes that we know from biology; among other things, there is no sharp boundary between simple non-organic chemistry and 'life-chemistry'. There are some that define life as chemical evolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_evolution) - this theory has the advantage that it can be generalised; all that is needed is a good generalisation of 'chemistry'.