This is a good one. Sussman, like many pioneers, is refreshingly un-dogmatic, perhaps as a consequence of having never been properly indoctrinated by the standard CS curriculum. Plus, he's both brilliant and by this point very experienced in solving lots of real problems.
FWIW, he could certainly lecture for 60 minutes on developmental systems biology, but you shouldn't believe a word of it: he seem to still be holding tight to the (once irresistible, but now mostly discredited) "DNA as Turing Machine tape" analogy. I had to stifle a guffaw when he says cells have "oh, I don't know, a few K of RAM". Somebody should clue him in about the proteome: there's a huge amount of really dynamic stuff going on in a living cell, and DNA-as-code simply isn't the whole story. There's a great book by Susan Oyama<http://books.google.com/books?id=E3O83dh96uEC&dq=isbn:0822324660> that clarifies this stuff. Anyway, if we're going to look for inspiration in biology, we should take some care to try to know what we're talking about. -- Max On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 7:12 AM, Marcel Weiher <[email protected]>wrote: > > > http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-Compute > > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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