[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>Could it be possible, then, to somehow merge the "Digital DNA" of an A.I.
>with the double helix of a human genome, thereby creating a human being
>with
>the "soul" of an A.I.?
In normal parlance:
Given the software and/or data files necessary for a human-equivalent A.I.,
could you encode it in the base-pairs of DNA?
Absolutely.
It's the first part that's tricky. :) The limiting factors would be the
length (since we have very little idea what what the size of an A.I.'s
infoset is*) and the cohesion of the medium - DNA is pretty stable, but if
the length ends up being millions of kilometers it might not hold together
long enough for the encoding to take place.
A more interesting question:
Given a data file representing a state snapshot of a human-equivalent A.I.
and a description of an automaton which processes the data - in other words,
a Turing machine description of an A.I. - can you encode the data on DNA and
construct a biological processor (probably a whole suite of enzymes) that
acts as the automaton?
Probably, but this would probably function unbearably slowly - like a 10^100
slowdown in subjective time.
Could you cram all of this into a human cell? My guess, no. But again, we
have no idea what the scales involved are.
>The idea is cool, but I have no idea if it is remotely plausible or
>laughable
>on a scientific level -- even in the realm of science fiction.
The SFnal take would be to postulate a subset of this - some biological
Turing machine that isn't an A.I. but still a useful tool - and injecting it
into existing life forms.
....
* So how much data is necessary to encode an A.I.?
A first crack at a guess for just the data, not counting the code: (# of
neurons in the brain (1e11) ^ # of interconnections per neuron (1e4) ) * #
bits to meaningfully represent connection strength/type (16) * # bits to
address a neuron (26) / #bits per DNA pair (2) = 2e16 base pairs.
For comparison, there are 3e9 base pairs in the human genome. So nominally
representing the state of a human brain in DNA would take about six million
times as much DNA as we cart around in each cell.
For reference, the DNA strand would be about 7e8cm long, or 4000 miles.
Refs:
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/what.html
http://www.ornl.gov/TechResources/Human_Genome/home.html
http://www.auhs.edu/netbiochem/nucacids.htm
http://www.webcom.com/~legacysy/convert2/unitconvertIE.html
Joshua
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