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The problem with the analogy to a sorting algorithm is that a sorting algorithm is obviously computable. What if there's something like protein folding that ha
by narrator 10y ago
The problem with the analogy to a sorting algorithm is that a sorting algorithm is obviously computable. What if there's something like protein folding that has O(2^n) complexity involved in being a person that the body does trillions of times a second but is impossible for any size computer to do for large N?
- feral 10y agoThat seems a very specific/narrow point, not a general objection. But anyway: I guess its possible human biological hardware does something difficult to simulate on a computer (at least one similar to our current architectures.) Given a super advanced intelligence, though, I doubt adding hardware that does protein folding (or the protein folding analogue operation) fast - in biology if necessary - is going to be a major obstacle. And that's if it can't come up with an algorithm that does an equivalent operation, that runs well on whatever hardware it already has.
- narrator 10y agoIf we could compute everything in a living system in polynomial time or better then we could design drugs inside of a computer and that technology would be worth billions! Seriously, until we are doing drug design with computers, we don't really understand biological systems well enough to simulate them inside a computer. Drugs interact with folded up proteins all the time so this requires simulation of protein folding and this algorithm is exponential time complexity, so basically not computable for anything but extremely trivial problems.