Comment by encyclopediai

18 hours ago

Every day now I expect that they or somebody alike will discover in our genes that we (ie life) are lambda terms, combinators or something similar to Universally Programmable Intelligent Matter https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~bmaclenn/UPIM/UPIM3.pdf or chemSKI https://imar.ro/~mbuliga/talks/chemski-with-tokens.html

All it takes is to identify the syntax, so to say.

7 comments

encyclopediai

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SirMadam  17 hours ago

This is something I like joking around about, with regard to how LLMs are 'decent' [debatable but taken as a premise] software engineers. For a long time people have said DNA/RNA/etc is the programming of life.

If it is indeed HIGHLY analogous to programming, we would then expect LLMs/future systems to be HIGHLY proficient at accurate ex-vivo gene [or enzyme/protein] modification/construction

  • asdff  15 hours ago

    It is akin to programming but more complicated. In this case, you can run the same code on different systems and get different results, and this is in fact an advantage of the language as a whole. Same DNA throughout your entire body yet you have distinct cellular identities thanks to this ability.

    But the hard part is really nothing is annotated or defined. We have annotated and defined some things but its tricky work and so much left to describe. Its like you have entered a house and have no idea what each room is for, or what the light switches do, or even what even is a light switch, or a room for that matter. Maybe you identify a repeated plastic switch through the building that seems to be nearby doorways, you call this the light switch. What does it do exactly? Have to flip it and hope you can detect what changed. Hopefully when you flip it the whole house doesn't just die in the womb, but actually limps along in some way where you can say "this switch controls the garage developing as an attached structure or detached in the back yard" Even more fun when the switch is just one piece of the circuit of a dozen plus switches that all have to flip a certain way in a certain order over a certain time for some function.

hardbass  9 hours ago

I have bookmarked the links to read later but until then I would ask in what sense? To my knowledge the known physics currently is all within the realms of a Turing machine, which is equivalent to lambda calculus.

  • encyclopediai  7 hours ago

    You can play with it. Equivalence with Turing machines is not the point of interest

    Sorry about this "not A but B", now is one of those situations where is needed.

    Is not:

    - cellular automata, - Turing machines

    implemented chemically.

    The goal, first of UPIM, then chemlambda or chemSKI, is simply to: - find chemical complexes, - or to make them

    (though I suspect that we shall discover them in our cells)

    so that they enter in random chemical reactions which are akin the graph rewriting inspired by lambda calculus or SKI combinators or Interaction Combinators.

    The thesis is that this chemical translation still can do "anything" despite the lack of control of reactions or the combinatorial explosion of possible reaction networks.

    Under this thesis we are graph quines.