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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.'"
Story is a dupe...original story can be found here.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The main research page may interest some of you. And for those that it doesn't help, perhaps you want to look at our Linux clusters instead?
And that word 'lifeform' - it brings the quality of the reporting down to the level of Star Trek psychobabble. Try 'organsim', or even 'virus', next time.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
> If we assume that all physical processes can be simulated by a computer (given complete knowledge of the laws of physics), which seems to be a safe assumption...
Aha, but your given is anything but, and hence your asumption isn't so safe.
As Kurzweil and many others have pointed out, we don't need to simulate every single neuron and synapse, let alone every single neurotransmitter molecule, in order to simulate the operations of an intelligent brain. Rather, research now focuses on simulating cognitive processes at a much higher symbolic level. The results, from auditory simulations of human audio processing to an artificial pancreas, show that many complex biochemical processes can be simulated to the required level of detail without bothering with simulating down to the quantum level or anywhere near it.
The math represented thus becomes quite different, and, given a simple extrapolation of accelerating returns regarding computing power per cost, show that within a decade we *will* have the processing ability to create a functional digital brain at the complexity level of a human brain. This doesn't automatically mean that model will be instantly intelligent, but, when you factor in our accelerating understanding and ability to model abstract thought processes in software on top of our ability to model the physical functions of the brain, it is not unreasonable to suppose that we will produce true digital intelligence by way of a bottom-up simulation of brain processes. Add in the accelerating returns principle, and, within a few years after that, our digital model wil have processing power thousands and then millions of time that of a single brain, which in turn, even before sentience can be used to help us refine our behavioral models of thought processes-- and the likelyhood that it will cross the threshold of intelligence approaches certainty.
It is only a matter of time, and the surprising thing is, if one simply projects the curve outward, how soon it will likely happen.
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Thought is free. - Shakespeare [The Tempest]
A (biological) virus does not eat or photosynthesize or have any metabolism at all. That's why they are virus particles, other than the slow degradation of all complex molecules if you have a tube full of virii they will just sit in the tube forever. Doing nothing. If you add sugar, protein, complex carbohydrates and sunlight to the tube of virii they will... sit there. Doing nothing. Not eating. Not metabolizing. Not replicating. Living things would either die, metabolize, or replicate, the virii do not. The virii does contain genetic information, if inserted into a cell the information is used to hijack the cell into making more copies of the virus. The virus may only encode a handful of proteins, but it uses the ribosomes and other protein building apparatus of the infected cell to make the viral proteins, and more copies of the viral genetic info (DNA or RNA) which is packaged and released from the cell (sometimes killing the cell in the process, sometimes not). Does this mean the virus is alive? All the protein synthesis, and packaging of the virus is done by the infected cell, the virus does not technically replicate itself, which is part of what we define as "life as we know it". They are not dead they just exist as a glitch. A primordial cell probably had a mutation that produced lots of particles that happened to be capable of causing the same glitch in other cells they encountered, virii are perhaps analagous to a "goto" loop that somehow copies itself to other programs, more than to actual computer viruses which imitate their biological namesake only to a certain degree. Maybe when the sony robot dogs start giving each other roborabies via bluetooth the analogy will be closer... IAABC - I am a biochemist - but genetic coding is still trickier than php scripting :P
You're welcome. Here's the correct quotes with attributions (from a fortune file circa 1989):
"Anything created must necessarily be inferior to the essence of the creator."
-- Claude Shouse (shouse@macomw.ARPA)
"Einstein's mother must have been one heck of a physicist."
-- Joseph C. Wang (joe@athena.mit.edu)
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Viruses do not have a metabolism.....
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
Virusses _never_ have a metabolism at any stage.
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill