I work at the Building Physics Laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland, and I investigate the possible use of Bayes' theorem in the building control field. The idea is to classify situations as bad respectively good based on feedback from the occupants and have the system learn from its mistakes.
Consider, for instance, the total amount of sunlight hitting your computer screen. Most people would like an automatic system to control their window blinds to keep that amount to an acceptable level, but the system cannot know a priori what that level will be for a given user. So we let the system set the blinds to a setting deemed acceptable for the average user and use the user's manual interventions to build up a list of bad settings, corresponding to the setting immediately before the intervention, and good settings, corresponding to the setting immediately after the intervention.
The system will then attempt to minimize the probability of the user rejecting its settings by applying Bayes' theorem.
I've done only preliminary exploration of this idea so far but the results are encouraging, and we plan to do a full-scale experiment this summer.
If binary makes so much sense for representing information and doing useful work with it, why is it that the fundamental building block in our body uses four base pairs? Is there some advantage to a quadary system that we might be able to learn from? If not, why didn't nature choose a binary system?
I think I can answer that question. A couple of years ago I attended a talk at CERN given by Apoorva Patel, a quantum physicist, in which he adresses that very same question.
His paper "Quantum Algorithms and the Genetic Code" explains that in classical physics one can use a yes/no question to distinguish between two items, and only two. This is why computer systems, and database systems in particular, work so well with a binary system.
Now things get a bit spookier in quantum physics and Patel shows that here a yes/no question can distinguish between four items (don't ask me how...) So the most efficient databases using quantum physics would naturally be encoded in alphabets of four characters. Now DNA is a chemical system obeying quantum physics and it is therefore not so much of a surprise that it too be based on four characters.
It is a remarkable thing that nature spontaneously evolved the most efficient database system from a quantum physics point of view, but after all, what is the survival of the fittest good for?
As a member of the team that produced antihydrogen I might want to add for information that the author of that comment, Gabrielse, is the leader of a directly competiting team that has been pursuing the same goal using a different approach.
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... is what it used to be called. CERN in Switzerland had it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lep
Does that mean they're borrowing heavily?
And let us not forget Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg in "The Fifth Element".
Consider, for instance, the total amount of sunlight hitting your computer screen. Most people would like an automatic system to control their window blinds to keep that amount to an acceptable level, but the system cannot know a priori what that level will be for a given user. So we let the system set the blinds to a setting deemed acceptable for the average user and use the user's manual interventions to build up a list of bad settings, corresponding to the setting immediately before the intervention, and good settings, corresponding to the setting immediately after the intervention.
The system will then attempt to minimize the probability of the user rejecting its settings by applying Bayes' theorem.
I've done only preliminary exploration of this idea so far but the results are encouraging, and we plan to do a full-scale experiment this summer.
His paper "Quantum Algorithms and the Genetic Code" explains that in classical physics one can use a yes/no question to distinguish between two items, and only two. This is why computer systems, and database systems in particular, work so well with a binary system.
Now things get a bit spookier in quantum physics and Patel shows that here a yes/no question can distinguish between four items (don't ask me how...) So the most efficient databases using quantum physics would naturally be encoded in alphabets of four characters. Now DNA is a chemical system obeying quantum physics and it is therefore not so much of a surprise that it too be based on four characters.
It is a remarkable thing that nature spontaneously evolved the most efficient database system from a quantum physics point of view, but after all, what is the survival of the fittest good for?
Slower. Light particle are their own anti-particles and don't care whether they're interacting with matter or antimatter, the result is the same.
As a member of the team that produced antihydrogen I might want to add for information that the author of that comment, Gabrielse, is the leader of a directly competiting team that has been pursuing the same goal using a different approach.