DNA as a program, must also specify its own "start" and "end" statements to the processing elements, or those cellular constituents that represent the processor, insofar as DNA is conceived as a stored program.
DNA is self-limiting, like any program written in a language for a modern algorithmic machine, i.e. a binary computer. DNA tends to "randomise", due to background noise, and due to active processes that try to attenuate that noise (maintain the DNA "signal"), apart from mitosis/meiosis and the intentional modulation of that same signal.
Is there a deeper connection between randomness and uncertainty (i.e. noise), the algorithmic halting problem, and the existence of Life and how it controls or directs energy toward information storage and transcription?
Edit: maybe this should be in Comp Sci or Phys & Math.
What I'm getting at here is if there are strings which are "functional" - assuming most are not, and there's a way to generate or specify a given string - but have an indeterminate halting point (or set of conditions which when met will halt a given machine), how different is such a scenario to that of early forms of proto-life? Something must have persisted and eventually replicated or copied its programming, something that was essentially strings of abstract bits in some kind of chemical processing system.
DNA is self-limiting, like any program written in a language for a modern algorithmic machine, i.e. a binary computer. DNA tends to "randomise", due to background noise, and due to active processes that try to attenuate that noise (maintain the DNA "signal"), apart from mitosis/meiosis and the intentional modulation of that same signal.
Is there a deeper connection between randomness and uncertainty (i.e. noise), the algorithmic halting problem, and the existence of Life and how it controls or directs energy toward information storage and transcription?
Edit: maybe this should be in Comp Sci or Phys & Math.
What I'm getting at here is if there are strings which are "functional" - assuming most are not, and there's a way to generate or specify a given string - but have an indeterminate halting point (or set of conditions which when met will halt a given machine), how different is such a scenario to that of early forms of proto-life? Something must have persisted and eventually replicated or copied its programming, something that was essentially strings of abstract bits in some kind of chemical processing system.
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