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Articles

Is Everything A Computer?

Paul Austin Murphy computes the probabilities.

The term ‘computer’ is both vague and broad. Some people involved in the field of artificial intelligence even believe that molecules are computers. Or, more precisely, they argue that molecules are closed physical systems which compute. That is to say, molecules carry out information processing: they receive input, work on that input, and then produce output. Indeed, in one place I came across the following representation of the DNA molecule as a Turing machine:

Input Tape = DNA
Tape Reading Head = Ribosome
State Register = RNA
States = Amino acids
Instruction Table = DNA codon table
Output Tape = Proteins
(see ‘Is DNA a Turing Machine’ by Anand Mallaya, at anandcv.

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