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.'"

Comments

Simulating intelligence?

[4D6963]

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?

Re:Simulating intelligence?

[egomaniac]

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).

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, the question boils down to "is intelligence a physical process?" Everything we know about the brain's operation says that the answer is a resounding "yes" -- and if intelligence is merely a manifestation of the physical operation of the human brain, then there is nothing about it that can't, at least in theory, be simulated.

Re:Life is not a binary distinction

[Red Flayer]

"You can either use the word "life" in a sentence or not but you can't use a fraction of the word ("li" or "fe" don't mean fractional life - or anything at all for that matter)."

Oh, without capital letters, they mean nothing -- but I know quite a few chemists who'd dispute that Li and Fe are meaningless. :)

To get on-topic, I think that humans constantly categorize and assign labels to things as either a member of a group or outside it, which IS binary.

That creature is a fish|not a fish. That creature is a mammal; or it lays eggs and has a bill, so it is a bird (ummm, bad example, on second thought). That rock is igneous; or it is not. That tree is deciduous|not deciduous.

What is the point of defining something if the definition does not allow us to use it to categorize? Things like this virus, and viruses in general, raise the debate over what is life|not life. And that debate can stimulate greater knowledge, and greater understanding, by challenging our assumptions and our definitions... so I'm all for making distinctions when we can.

Re:I don't get it

[shaitand]

Perhaps the better solution to this dillema is to realize the debate can not be settled because "life" is not a thing. It is a label. Humans invented the label and since it is an artificial construction its scope is equally artificial.

There is no such thing as "life" we invented a classification without defining it and therefore we have a debate. The only reason we even find it to be important is that we are still trying to come up with excuses to think of ourselves as something more than a random cluster of protein soup.