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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1999 Relationships can be complex PUT your foot on the accelerator and your car accelerates, put it on the brake and it slows down. You don't expect the accelerator to influence the brakes, or open the doors. But inside computers it can happen. Just occasionally we input to one programme and inadvertently affect another. For example, modifying large portions of a document with several applications open can demand more RAM than i available, and thereby have an adverse impact on the outcome. It turns out to be a general characteristic of complex systems that they seldom operate in a simple and linear manner, although they may often appear to be doing so. Humans are a good example of such systems. Presenting two people with the same problem and conditions can have vastly different outcomes. What is surprising is that people suppose the tweaking of the human genome to create a being with blue eyes should result in just a single change. I am going to give you a guess that when we have decoded the genome and begin to experiment with the creation of beings to our own design, we will see some startling results. Broadly speaking, I suspect just one or two minor genetic adjustments will see multiple unexpected outcomes. And here I mean that we may choose to programme blonde hair, height six feet and slim build, only to find that the being is more prone to heart attacks and is immediately diabetic. This may seem irrational, and perhaps even gross, but all the indications are that the true complexity of our genome and the beings it creates are far greater than initially indicated by Crick and Watson's simple model. The apparent complexity is probably belayed by the fact that there are only four basic elements: Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine (ACGT) configured in a simple double helix. These four elements are arranged in three-letter words with only 64 in the entire language. After redundancies are removed this is reduced to a mere 20 different meanings. The genome itself has approximately a billion such words, making it roughly equivalent to about one CD, and a small fraction of a DVD. As our computers help us gradually to decode the genome, they may just rise to the challenge of unpicking the complex relationships embedded in the structure. I also suspect that there will be a few surprises along the way, and it could turn out the only material capable of performing such a task is the material itself. The big question is: can silicon rise to the challenge of modelling something on such vast scale? The world waits with bated breath for the decoding of the genome to be completed. But that is only the first step on a long journey of understanding. When we discover the function of each element in our individual make up, I suspect we will find another layer of complexity. It is already clear that we are genetically related to all living things, not just the vertebrates. Much of our code is related to grass, worms, viruses and diseases - we are all the same stuff. The genetic differences between rabbits, monkeys and humans are extremely small. In fact, after the first few cell divisions it is difficult to differentiate between the foetuses. As new generations of computers evolve, it will be interesting to see if we close the most obvious loop as we become related to them and they to us. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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