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Comment by TheEzEzz | Hacker News Reader

>You can't go from genome => organism without a WHOOOOOLE lot of Ceteris Paribus to fill in the gaps.

Of course not. Likewise, if all you had was the binary of a Linux distro, and you didn't have a computer or any other associated hardware, it would be very hard to get that code running.

On the other hand, if you were trying to recode the distribution from scratch, without trying to decompile anything, a good ball park estimate for the size of your source code would be the size of the original distribution.

That's Kurzweil's point: he's simply trying to measure the complexity of the system, to get a rough estimate for how complex the model will need to be.

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Recreating the source code by itself does not, in this case, constitute a "model". In order to actually run that binary, you also need to create a virtual computer for it to inhabit.

The genome is the source code for that, too.

True, but that fact only becomes useful after you already have it running on a virtual machine. Chicken-and-egg problem.

The chicken-and-egg problem can take a certain amount of effort to solve, but it's not a major engineering obstacle.

The easiest way to bootstrap a self-compiling compiler from bare metal is probably by writing a Forth inner interpreter in machine code, which is a few hundred bytes; a Forth outer interpreter in threaded code, which is a few hundred cells; and then an interpreter for the language of your compiler in Forth, which is likely to be a few dozen to a few thousand lines of code, depending on the language. (I don't know if Forth is good for anything else, but it's optimal for this.)

I don't know how to estimate this task properly, but I doubt it's more than a few weeks of work for a skilled person.

But the claim wasn't that having the genome is directly useful, rather that it's a decent approximation of the upper bound on the irreducible complexity.

You could probably recode the Linux distribution in 10% of its current size just from knowing where you were going and having an arbitrary amount of time to finish the job, or 1% or less if you didn't have to interoperate with any hardware or software already in the wild. It's full of Greenspunning and other forms of code duplication.

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