4 ms·

29,903 base pairs (4 bit values), so that’s 119,612 bits, or about 15 KB of information total. A devious little self-replicator in 15 KB which runs on our bio s

29,903 base pairs (4 bit values), so that’s 119,612 bits, or about 15 KB of information total. A devious little self-replicator in 15 KB which runs on our bio substrate!

kijin 7y ago
I wonder how many of those base pairs are devoted to evading the host's immune system, as opposed to the primary function of being a fork bomb.
- majewsky 7y ago
  > opposed to the primary function of being a fork bomb /me realizes that every organism is a fork bomb
- zaarn 7y ago
  Probably not that many, it should be sufficient that the immune system doesn't have anything to specifically deal with it, so it only has to evade the complement system (which for a virus isn't terribly hard). It also helps that the strategy is simply "replicate and just swarm the defense".
GistNoesis 7y ago
There are 4 base types (A,T,C,G) so it's only 2-bit values. There is also some redundancy coding in the amino acid sequence that follow the DNA. So if you compute the information of the codons sequence it's even lower. It's quite compact. What would be interesting to know, is the percentage of programs still running when a few bits are modified, to know how sharp is the search space. Exploring living programs space, you probably can use some advance neural network techniques, like GPT-2 to explore it more efficiently, directly in its compressed representation to provide an high level interface with slider controlling the high-level properties.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Gene overlap is also possible and exists in viruses, so the true amount of data is actually usually a bit larger than the the sequence's length because of this "compression".
zaarn 7y ago
"Scientists find Arbitrary Code Execution vulnerability in Human Cells, vendor unresponsive to security issue"
ajuc 7y ago
29903 base pairs is 59806 bits or 7.3 KB. Hepatitis B is 800 bytes for comparison.

29,903 base pairs (4 bit values), so that’s 119,612 bits, or about 15 KB of information total. A devious little self-replicator in 15 KB which runs on our bio substrate!

kijin 7y ago

I wonder how many of those base pairs are devoted to evading the host's immune system, as opposed to the primary function of being a fork bomb.

majewsky 7y ago
> opposed to the primary function of being a fork bomb /me realizes that every organism is a fork bomb
zaarn 7y ago
Probably not that many, it should be sufficient that the immune system doesn't have anything to specifically deal with it, so it only has to evade the complement system (which for a virus isn't terribly hard). It also helps that the strategy is simply "replicate and just swarm the defense".

GistNoesis 7y ago

There are 4 base types (A,T,C,G) so it's only 2-bit values. There is also some redundancy coding in the amino acid sequence that follow the DNA. So if you compute the information of the codons sequence it's even lower. It's quite compact. What would be interesting to know, is the percentage of programs still running when a few bits are modified, to know how sharp is the search space. Exploring living programs space, you probably can use some advance neural network techniques, like GPT-2 to explore it more efficiently, directly in its compressed representation to provide an high level interface with slider controlling the high-level properties.

Avamander 7y ago
Gene overlap is also possible and exists in viruses, so the true amount of data is actually usually a bit larger than the the sequence's length because of this "compression".

zaarn 7y ago

"Scientists find Arbitrary Code Execution vulnerability in Human Cells, vendor unresponsive to security issue"

ajuc 7y ago

29903 base pairs is 59806 bits or 7.3 KB. Hepatitis B is 800 bytes for comparison.