adamgravitis
Joined 17 years ago
Joined 17 years ago
-> so basically, Canadian "venture" capital. They don't even want to talk to you unless profitability is there or within a few months. So, basically, it distills to a barely riskier than usual bank loan, except you pay the loan with equity.
A bunch of molecular recipes encoded in a few gigs of nucleotides with some crude feedback loops do not a human make.
Quite apart from epigenetics as it’s commonly presented (methylation, and all sorts of histone antics), you might recall that DNA itself doesn’t magically grow up: you do need a cell.
It’s somewhat (and only poorly) analogous to being handed the source code to a C compiler written in C, without knowing C. Does the C code really encode C? Well, not without the compiler it doesn’t....
There’s then a very interesting discussion around how it’s even possible for a mammalian nervous system to bootstrap itself. Figuring out walking seems perhaps emergent: it’s a learnable technique based on not falling. But how do dog breeds retain intrinsic high-level behaviours even if they’ve never observed them? What makes a Shepherd so concerned when his assumed flock becomes dispersed?
We are a tremendously long way from answering these questions, but I would caution anyone who thinks it just “in the DNA”.
A much much more rigorous proposal was put forward by an American mathematician several years ago regarding the geometry of trajectories of computer programs, which holds considerably more promise than whatever flimflam this author was going on about:
https://rd.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2FBF00046564.pdf
"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government." - Tacitus
The problem is massively intractable. QC could revolutionize the space.
Formerly: VP Engineering at Upverter in Toronto. Formerly: Founder at algoanywhere / CTO @ 500px
Background: - Engineering Science via UToronto - Not-so-amateur computational economist, mathematical physicist, bioinformatician.