[HN Gopher] Scientists create new class of "Turing patterns" in ...
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       Scientists create new class of "Turing patterns" in colonies of E.
       coli
        
       Author : vo2maxer
       Score  : 35 points
       Date   : 2021-02-24 00:09 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
        
       | ben_w wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | > _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 wrote:
       | Is this suggesting that we could have "living" / biological
       | computers?
        
         | jazzyjackson wrote:
         | 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 [2]
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110#The_proof_of_universa...
         | [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_computer
        
         | ben_w wrote:
         | 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).
        
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       (page generated 2021-02-25 23:03 UTC)