Life and Intelligence as compression algorithms
Historical thread asking whether life and intelligence can be modeled as compression, with DNA, proteins, workers, algorithms, and Pi as examples.
I am working on a thought that I was interested in publishing as a letter. The basic idea is that life can actually be looked at as a compression algorithm.
A normal compression algorithm builds a library of common patterns that it can then represent with characters or a smaller amount of data. If you were building a city, you could compress the data into a much smaller package and just order one building of type A and one building of type B.
For DNA, what is needed to create a new animal? You could say put one bone cell here and another bone cell there, but this would require a large amount of data to accurately describe a human being. What the body does instead is create workers, like proteins, RNA, spliceosomes, and enzymes, each of which takes care of a trusted task. In a way, the creation of proteins, enzymes, and RNA are forms of compression and help minimize the data that DNA needs. What math should be included to show this?
Archived source: https://web.archive.org/web/20170323122449/http://www.spacetimeandtheuniverse.com/against-mainstream/8100-life-intelligence-compression-algorithms.html
Replies
Tom
I was reading a paper, "Does quantum mechanics play a non-trivial role in life?" and came across a line about quantum fluctuations as a rich source of algorithmic complexity. Sort of had me thinking about the life-as-compression idea: algorithms, and certainly proteins, serving as compression.
Tom
Infinite compression using a formula can be shown by an exact calculation of Pi. If you wanted to present Pi to infinite detail you would need an infinite amount of bytes. However, a simple program can calculate it with just a few KB of code.
astrotech
I would think the basic formula is to divide the total bits by the number of iterative subdivisions and so on. For instance, the chemical workers that know how to construct hard proteins for cell walls repeat the instruction to make a skin cell. Another instruction repeats the order for skin cells for the required number of skin cells. To calculate this for a real living thing, you have to know the code before you can reverse engineer the compression formula.