On 24 Mar 2014, at 05:41, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/23/2014 8:57 PM, LizR wrote:
Is DNA a universal programming language?
I'm not sure what a "universal programming language" means. Just 1s
and 0s are enough language.
Universal language can have a very tiny alphabet {0, 1}.
But the alphabet is not the language. You need some grammar, and
semantics (operational at least). The test is in showing how to write
a program.
I think you probably mean to ask is whether a cell is a universal
computer with DNA as the program.
Ah! I agree. This is meaningful, and I would say yes, even for bacteria.
I don't know if there's been a formal proof but it almost certainly
is.
OK. From René Thomas work, it is easy to build a formal proof. Or even
from Jacob and Monod. I discovered computer science in that paper :)
Making a universal computer is pretty easy. Wolfram's rule 110
produces a universal computer in one dimension with only two colors
and nearest neighbor rules.
That was not easy to find. And it is not always easy to prove that
something is Turing complete. It took 70 years to prove that
diophantine polynomials are Turing universal. Even just the degree 4.
Open problem for the degree 3.
But you are right, universality is cheap, just that it is more and
more complex to prove once the systems are more and more simple.
Bruno
Brent
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