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Is life a form of computation?
Alan Turing and John von Neumann saw it early: the logic of life and the logic of code may be one and the same.
The movements of hinged components, the capture and release of smaller molecules, and the manipulation of chemical bonds are all individually random, reversible, and inexact, driven this way and that by constant thermal buffeting. In discussions with Polish mathematician Stanisław Ulam at Los Alamos, he conceived the idea of “cellular automata,” pixel-like grids of simple computational units, all obeying the same rule, and all altering their states simultaneously by communicating only with their immediate neighbors. Real cells don’t literally have neural nets inside them, but they do run highly evolved, nonlinear, and purposive “programs” to decide on the actions they will take in the world, given external stimulus and an internal state.
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