I think that natural language and the human genome have about the same order of magnitude complexity.
The genome is 6 x 10^9 bits (2 bits per base pair) uncompressed, but there is a lot of noncoding DNA and some redundancy. By "decoding", I assume you mean building a model and understanding the genome to the point where you could modify it and predict what will happen. The complexity of natural language is probably 10^9 bits. This is supported by: - Turing's 1950 estimate, which he did not explain. - Landauer's estimate of human long term memory capacity. - The quantity of language processed by an average adult, times Shannon's estimate of the entropy of written English of 1 bit per character. - Extrapolating the relationship between language model training set size and compression ratio in this graph: http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/dissertation/ I don't think the encryption of the genome is any worse. Complex systems (that have high Kolmogorov complexity, are incrementally updatable, and do "useful" computation) tend to converge to the boundary between stability and chaos, where some perturbations decay while others grow. A characteristic of such systems (as studied by Kaufmann) is that the number of stable states or attractors tends to the square root of the size. The number of human genes is about the same as the size of the human vocabulary, about 30,000. Neither system is "encrypted" in the mathematical sense. Encryption cannot be an emergent property because it is at the extreme chaotic end of the spectrum. Changing one bit of the key or plaintext affects every bit of the ciphertext. The difference is that it is easier (faster and more ethical) to experiment with language models than the human genome. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ---- From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2006 3:23:10 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Natural versus formal AI interface languages Eric Baum wrote: > (Why should producing a human-level AI be cheaper than decoding the > genome?) Because the genome is encrypted even worse than natural language. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
