Glen E. P. Ropella wrote: > Because he'd bought into the idea that effects cause their causes in > living systems and he believed computation (as we know it today) cannot > represent these causal cycles. > > You have to remember that he did much of this work in the 70s and 80s Here's a paper by Ken Thompson where he describes a regular expression implementation based on object code generated on-the-fly for the IBM 7094. The 7094 was a 60's mainframe had instructions designed for self-modifying code. (Lisp predates that..)
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=363347.363387 Also note that ~8% of human DNA is highly similar to retroviruses -- we're slowly being rewritten from the outside. http://genomebiology.com/2001/2/6/reviews/1017. ...and even by each other.. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T3B-47HPGPW-4&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=937dc8c7b72003e57bbd2971e7ae71be Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org