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corgis_are_awesome t1_j7q87s5 wrote

Reply to comment by apfejes in We’re Recursion and we’re using AI to decode biology and industrialize drug discovery! by ShakeNBakeGibson

I don’t know… to be honest, the way you are describing biological systems, the more I think of the way how real world software systems actually evolve in the wild, and the nightmare that is debugging large, complex, undocumented systems. But even if it seems chaotic, there are logical patterns that can be found, and understanding that can be developed.

Out in the real world, software programs rarely grow into the perfectly optimized and well organized logical constructs taught about in college. More often than not, they are full of extremely wonky solutions and poorly documented workarounds that have been duct taped together years ago by random people pasting code from stack overflow.

In my mind, biology isn’t even a biology problem as much as it is a particle physics problem.

For example - Particle Life: https://youtu.be/p4YirERTVF0

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apfejes t1_j7qablb wrote

> In my mind, biology isn’t even a biology problem as much as it is a particle physics problem.

Emergence is a thing, but 3.7 Billion years of emergent property evolution has created levels of complexity that are far FAR beyond the level of the simple software tools that can mimic the surface level complexity you see in "computer life" simulations.

The computer complexity you're talking about with wonky solutions and poorly documented code are, on average, about 40 years old.

The biological equivalence would be to continue building the same way for about 100,000,000x longer.

I don't dispute the analogy, but it's a bit of Dunning-Kruger, again. The level of complexity isn't going to be obvious to you until you start trying to solve the problems. 3.7 Billion years of wonky solutions layered on top of each other is a lot different than 40 years.

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