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The order in a deck of cards is unique, but it's not complex. The nucleotide sequence in a chromosome is unique and complex. An analogy of your comparison wou
by bduerst 11y ago
The order in a deck of cards is unique, but it's not complex. The nucleotide sequence in a chromosome is unique and complex.
An analogy of your comparison would be comparing a single sentence to the sum of mankind's written works, with the latter being life. A complex, organized source of information like that is special.
- philh 11y agoIf you shuffle a deck of 3 billion cards, the order is less compressible than the human genome. It's still not special. Is it complex, by your definition? How about my scribble, or a snowflake?
- bduerst 11y agoIt would be complex but no longer unique. If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell?
- philh 11y agoWhy would a shuffle of 3 billion distinct cards be less unique than a shuffle of 52 distinct cards? > If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell? No. It would be a unique string of worthless jibberish. Meanwhile, the instructions for a Saturn V rocket have probably been written down in at least two places. So if you have a copy of them, they're less unique than my random string, yet more special.
- bduerst 11y agoRight, the information is unique, not the medium. There are multiple copies of the Saturn V blueprints, just as there are multiple copies of the human genome in your cells. Is Lord of the Rings not unique because it's stored on multiple mediums?
- cousin_it 11y agoMaybe along with Kolmogorov complexity we could measure "usefulness" of a bit string, i.e. how much utility an agent would agree to pay for it. The idea is that "complex" things, like life, are likely to contain solutions to many problems we care about. Of course that approach depends on the agent, but maybe you could get a general definition by referring to a general agent, like AIXItl.
- chm 11y agoWouldn't the compression depend on how many symbols you used? I guess you meant "shuffle a deck of 3 billion different cards"?
- lhorie 11y agoSomething doesn't need to be complex to be special. Consider this card deck order: 8C KH 3S 10D 2C 7H 9S 5D QC 4H AS 6D JC 8H KS 3D 10C 2H 7S 9D 5C QH 4S AD 6C JH 8S KD 3C 10H 2S 7D 9C 5H QS 4D AC 6H JS 8D KC 3H 10S 2D 7C 9H 5S QD 4C AH 6S JD As far as mathematics go, it's as probabilistically likely as any other sequence, but among deck orders, this particular sequence is special because not only it happens more often than most other deck orders, but it even has a name. As it turns out, that sequence can be easily reconstructed from a mnemonic and it's often used in magic tricks.
- bduerst 11y agoBut sequence is unique, but could arguably randomly come up like you say. My point was that biological information is both complex and unique, which makes it special.