3 ms·

Scientists create new class of “Turing patterns” in colonies of E. coli

43 points by vo2maxer 6y ago

ben_w 6y ago
How difficult would it be to implement Conway’s Game of Life in E. coli? Fresher, undergrad thesis, PhD, postgrad, or not yet possible?
ncfausti 6y ago
> The challenge is moving from Turing's admittedly simplified model to pinpointing the precise mechanisms serving in the activator and inhibitor roles. This is especially challenging in biology, where scientists are keen to shed more light on the question of how a complex embryo can emerge from tissue that is completely homogenous. Maybe I'm just too deep into my Theory of Computation class right now, but this sounds a lot like a closure (or lack thereof) property in the set of "homogenous tissue", no?
ctocoder 6y ago
Is this suggesting that we could have "living" / biological computers?
- jazzyjackson 6y ago
  Turing patterns, not turing completeness. Check out the wiki[1], you've probably seen the patterns before. It's related to cellular automata tho, which are basically very simple reaction-diffusion systems, and I can't quite wrap my head around it but certain automata have been proven to be able to simulate any computation (I guess with the right initial state?) [2] Recently there's been more work on getting analog computations out of chemical reactions, you can check out [3] and its footnote "A programmable chemical computer with memory and pattern recognition". Life itself you might say is a very high level abstraction over such chemical computers, and I guess the article posted here is an example of finally building those abstractions ourselves, being synthetic biology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110#The_proof_of_universality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110#The_proof_of_universa... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_computer
- ben_w 6y ago
  We are all living biological computers. (Well, except for the occasional experiments where people let GPT-2 or 3 post for them to see what happens).

43 points by vo2maxer 6y ago

How difficult would it be to implement Conway’s Game of Life in E. coli? Fresher, undergrad thesis, PhD, postgrad, or not yet possible?

ncfausti 6y ago

> The challenge is moving from Turing's admittedly simplified model to pinpointing the precise mechanisms serving in the activator and inhibitor roles. This is especially challenging in biology, where scientists are keen to shed more light on the question of how a complex embryo can emerge from tissue that is completely homogenous. Maybe I'm just too deep into my Theory of Computation class right now, but this sounds a lot like a closure (or lack thereof) property in the set of "homogenous tissue", no?

ctocoder 6y ago

Is this suggesting that we could have "living" / biological computers?

jazzyjackson 6y ago
Turing patterns, not turing completeness. Check out the wiki[1], you've probably seen the patterns before. It's related to cellular automata tho, which are basically very simple reaction-diffusion systems, and I can't quite wrap my head around it but certain automata have been proven to be able to simulate any computation (I guess with the right initial state?) [2] Recently there's been more work on getting analog computations out of chemical reactions, you can check out [3] and its footnote "A programmable chemical computer with memory and pattern recognition". Life itself you might say is a very high level abstraction over such chemical computers, and I guess the article posted here is an example of finally building those abstractions ourselves, being synthetic biology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110#The_proof_of_universality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110#The_proof_of_universa... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_computer
ben_w 6y ago
We are all living biological computers. (Well, except for the occasional experiments where people let GPT-2 or 3 post for them to see what happens).