LIfe 2.0

[paulhope]

"One of synthetic biology's most radical spirits is Drew Endy. Dr Endy, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to the subject from engineering, not biology. As an engineer, he can recognise a kludge when he sees one. And life, in his opinion, is a kludge." - "Life 2.0", in The Economist

Comments

[anonymous]

Hey, just had my first philosophy of computational modelling class. cellular automata all the rage. we sat around and played with Life 3000 for 15 minutes.
then my professor grumbled about Wolfram.

howre things?

Dave

[paulhope]

Oh man. I spent the summer of '05 grumbling about Wolfram. What a wanker.

I've just been swamped shopping classes. I checked out a Literary Theory class that made me sick, but a Sociolinguistics class that was surprisingly welcoming. I may post on these later.

How do cellular automata get used in modelling...what are you modelling?

[anonymous]

well, basically as of yet (one class in) we've just looked at cellular automata and how they demonstrate that comlpex shit can arise from painfully basic rules and operations

[paulhope]

how they demonstrate that comlpex shit can arise from painfully basic rules and operations.

How is "complexity" defined?

I think the thing about apparently-racist social organization resulting as a kind of emergent property is a key point. My feeling for a while has been that in, say, victim studies, there's a lot of inferring from observed social patterns to subconscious intentions on the part of the individual players. The inference is bad...