Hacker News Reader

Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

The equivocation to programming language is misleading, it implies the “language” is context free or context sensitive when dna is probably on the order of natural language complexity (posits I).

View on HN

Far more complex, I would argue. The “compiler” (or perhaps the “linker”?) consists of laws of physics and chemistry that govern intra- and intermolecular bonding and protein folding with such complexity that it has been the subject of one of the largest distributed computing networks ever: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

Well I would say if you're going to use the programming metaphor that perhaps it's both compiled AND interpreted.

Compilation of DNA builds a phenotype and it gets interpreted during the phenotype's runtime resulting in epigenetics.

DNA is almost exactly machine code. It's directly executed by ribosomes and other cellular machines. Of course there are no guard rails.

Except that it doesn’t represent logic, it represents strings of amino acids that form proteins that fold up in unpredictable ways and interact with lots of other things to do stuff that half the time is weird and inefficient and doesn’t make sense.

That is logic, even if we cannot fully comprehend the system yet.

Call it that if you want to, but I’d be rather unhappy if that was how machine code worked.

I wouldn’t compare it to machine code alone and for it to be considered following under rules that can be broken down fundamentally to appeasing what we define as logic. I think of recursive functions calling other recursive functions with returning variables that effect the whole mess of a system when I read the perverse alterations to the animals in the article.

There's quite a bit of logic encoded. DNA has equivalents of conditional jumps, and stored state. That's in the stuff that for a long time was called "junk DNA" between the encoding sequences.

DNA is less formally complex than natural language. Natural language is somewhere between context-sensitive and context-free. Valid DNA sequences are fully characterized by {Start codon + {Amino Acid}* + Stop codon}*, a regular language.

That’s the lexer, consider the parser or the semantics?

Yes, however the "machine" that executes the code< namely the physical world is not deterministic and not a Turing machine, generally, at least because it is governed by unpredictable quantum effects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com