Archive for September 20th, 2007

Jim Carrey talking about physics

September 20, 2007

From Late night with Connan O’brien

Typogenetics

September 20, 2007

Typogenentics is an attempt to change the rules of genetics into a formal system. The idea was invented by Douglas Hofstadter, and written down in his famous book Godel, Escher, Back. When I read about the system a few days ago I coudn’t help wondering about using the system to test all those RNA world theories for the origin of life. Like for example programming the rules into a genetic algorithm that looks for self replicating strings in typogenetics. But after a few searches on google I found out someone did just that:

 http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/hons/projects/1999/Andrew.Snare/

There are also some papers writen about the subject:

A study of Replicators and Hypercycles in Typogenetics form the journal: European Conference on Artificial Life

But what about adding some thermodynamics laws in the system and seeing if replicators come out without using any fitness function? That could be a more relevant simulation. Here’s a nice page about that:

Overview of Computing for Biologists