11 ms·

I think you might be severely underestimating the level of parallelization happening in living beings. There are 100 trillion bacteria in every single human. Ex

I think you might be severely underestimating the level of parallelization happening in living beings. There are 100 trillion bacteria in every single human. Extrapolated to the number of bacteria on the planet, that's a whole lot of computational ability.

Retr0id 5y ago
I think you're severely underestimating 4^300. The answer to GP's question is that it's not an iterative brute-force. But I'm not a biologist, so I can't go into any more detail...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gus_massa 5y ago
  I think it's more important that it's a branch-and-prune algorithm. Many branches are created, but they are quickly pruned if they are worse or just unlucky. (Someone may be a the "best" human alive, but if a piano falls on the head, s/he ded and pruned.) Branches are retried, so if some branch is an improvement and is cut by bad luck, it may be luckier a few million years later. This does not guarantee that the "best" solution is found, but also avoid looking in the 4^300 combinations. Also, there are shorter genes, some proteins have ~50 amino acids (~150 bases), and some useful short amino acids chains have a length of 20 or even less (~60 bases or less). It's possible to start with a short versions that does something slightly useful, and slowly increase the length an efficiency.
  - jcims 5y ago
    The 'branch-and-prune' aspect of evolution seems to be the primary lifeline out of the combinatorics conundrum.