Turing, von Neumann and Brenner in the Deciphering of Biology

Опубликовано 2 марта 2017, 21:57

We live in interesting times. Seers predict Utopian or Dystopian futures where Algorithms and data will be the gods that rule our destiny and that of the planet. These new gods have taken time arriving. Over about 10,000 years, humans have moved from merely being the consequences of natural selection to becoming the principal agent of planetary change. Now we are, some say, on the verge of creating one network that will rule us all. How has this situation come about and how has the human brain been its agent? Much of our understanding on how we have changed the The earliest computer scientists and 20th century theoreticians also addressed this problem. Alan Turing was amongst the first of contemporary scientists to try to bring theory and computation to biology. His work on modelling pattern formation in life-forms greatly stimulated developmental biology, the 'Turing Test' allows us to check which of you in the audience is not human and the Turing Machine is of course known to you. John von Neumann created the constructor machine that allowed the 'cloning of Turning Machines. Erwin Schrödinger, inspired by this called chromosomes as 'architect's code and builder's craft' . Sydney Brenner points out that this is wrong and that this conflation persists today in the way many biologists use big-data. To use data well, says Brenner, we must also know the right level of abstraction for its analysis. My talk will try to critically convey Brenner's thesis on big-data and place it in the context of how brains develop and work.

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