virus: Life as a computation

Chitren Nursinghdass (Chitren.Nursinghdass@ens.insa-rennes.fr)
Sat, 07 Jun 1997 14:10:50 +0200


Thanks for the Gene Genie article, Grant.

So there seems to be a certain amount of credibility in
Chris Langton's paradigmatic view of "Life as a computation".

I'm inclined to view the Universe as a huge computer.

Or our computer as a mini-universe.

Or you might say the universe as a Turing machine,
but heck the universe was first, no ?

And in fact how did Turing call his ticker-tape machine ?

Universal computer ?

If I remember correctly, Von Neumann in his famous gendakenexperimente
about self-replication imagined a "universal constructor" floating
on a pond of some sort.

And hence he managed to find a mechanism by which self-replication
may occur, and it turned out a few years later that the mechanism
by which DNA replicates is similar.

Ah, the power of logical thinking.

Yash.