Comment

Comment by gen220

Translating problems across domains alert (!).

This article got me thinking. Oncology research sounds like live-debugging the race conditions of a millions-year-old, self-mutating program with billions (trillions) of lines of source code... And to top it all off, it's written in a language whose syntax is elusive.

If you're lucky, you can sometimes observe some aspects of its execution, but always at the cost of context-depriving tunnel vision, and only with a really expensive and proprietary IDE.

If that analogy's anywhere close to the mark, I can't imagine the patience of the people doing this research; bravo, sincerely.

With that analogy, this article suggests that researchers have attached an information-theory-backed meaning to a previously-observed pattern in the observed life cycle of our cells. The black box is revealing itself, with deliberate observation, to be an increasingly intricate and beautifully-designed grey box. Every lumen of that box is hard-fought, and must be super rewarding!

Nature's one heck of an engineer :)

parent gen220 7 years ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton