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

Life is not a binary distinction

[wsherman]

But is it really a life form?

Language is digital (as opposed to analog) in the sense that you either use a word in a sentence or you don't. 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). This creates (willful?) confusion in the minds of people who are very focused on a literal interprtation of language based laws and moral codes that "life" is a binary distinction.

The reality, however, is that the word "life" refers to a whole variety of concepts. There are all different ways of being alive and there are all different levels of being alive. Certainly we can find examples of things that are very "alive" just as we can find examples of colors that are very "blue" - but that doesn't mean every color is either pure blue not blue at all and it doesn't mean that something is either completely alive or not alive at all.

Going way off topic, the whole "life begins at conception" is what we in the sciences refer to as "not even wrong". After all, it's kind of hard for dead people to have children. If you really want to talk about when life began it would be at the big bang when matter developed the properties that cause it to form into complex self-replicating patterns over very long time scales.

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.

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?

[Paraplex]

I think the real difficulty here is that an intelligence (or any life form really) isn't really alive without input & output. You can't just simulate (based on any physical model) an isolated life form because it would just sit there. You need to simulate the environment it inhabits.

The line between the organism and the environment is very blurred. I tried to write a cellular autonoma of a weather/ecology system at once stage and was overwhelmed with the sheer number of variables which would have to be included to make it complete. You essentially can't leave anything out.

Don't mean to sound like a buddhist or anything, but everything is inextricably connected. You'd need to start by making a 500 million atom small environment or some such.

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:Simulating intelligence?

[fnurb]

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.

Re:Simulating intelligence?

[binarybum]

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.

I Hope...

[eno2001]

...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?)

Move along, nothing to see here...

[PoprocksCk]

...We've been able to have viruses on computers for many years now.

Duplicate; here's a link to the research anyway.

[tskirvin]

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?

Simulation of an entire lifeform, my ass!

[Expert Determination]

This is such a misleading headline. It's a simulation of the dynamics of the proteins forming the outer case of the virus to understand how it maintains its structure. It's purely about studying the structure - like an engineer's finite element simulation of a bridge. It's great work from this point of view. But it's not a simulation of any kind of biological process because the time scale is something like nanoseconds. So yes, it's a simulation, but it's not a simulation of a lifeform qua a lifeform.

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.

Cigar Store Indian

[Doc Ruby]

"satellite tobacco mosaic virus"

That sounds like the greatest hits of American products, all in one convenient album.

Re:I don't get it

[shawb]

I personally just put viruses firmly in the "gray area between living and not living" because those are arbitrary distinctions: nature always finds a way to find exceptions to the niches that man creates. Not to say that our classifications are pointless, we just have to realize that there are always going to be things in that gray area. This can be shown more dramatically in other biological definitions as well: when is a fetus "alive?" What is the exact point where two diverging groups are no longer the same species? All questions that have legal ramifications which essentially require a precise definition in order to make decisions as impartial as possible, but some things will straddle the line no matter how precise you try to make your definitions.

Re:Life vs. Non-life

[pomo monster]

Human beings do nothing outside a very specific environment tailored to their needs, where temperature, pressure, oxygen content of air, gravity, radiation, &c., all lie within specific bounds. How is this different from a virus needing an environment that includes cellular structures in order to replicate?

Me, I subscribe to structuralism.

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.

Why virii are not alive

[chrisjbuck]

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

Life = Non-life

[foxxo]

"Life" and "non-life" are useful, but ultimately meaningless ontological distinctions that really have no purpose at the sub-microscopic level. Any sensible person can see that ultimately there is no difference between what we deem living and what we call non-living, as the quick and the dead are still naught but particles in relationship to one another. The notion of self-identical objects larger than the fundamental particles is useful, but when dealing on such a tiny scale it's best to forget about such pointless ontological nonsense.