First Digital Simulation of an Entire Life Form 271
An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting on what appears to be the first digital simulation of an entire life form. Researchers created more than a million digital atoms to reverse engineer the satellite tobacco mosaic virus, a relatively simple organism. But is it really a life form? From the article: 'Viruses are tiny bundles of protein and genetic material that straddle the line between life and non-life. Many scientists prefer to call them "particles" because even though they contain RNA or DNA like other lifeforms, they can only replicate inside other living cells.'"
First Digital Simulation of an Entire Slashdot DUP (Score:2, Informative)
Story is a dupe...original story can be found here [slashdot.org].
Duplicate; here's a link to the research anyway. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't get it (Score:1, Informative)
Well, the "big fuss" is not that viruses may or may not be life. (That debate has been going on for quite some time.) The big fuss is that this is the first time something this large has been simulated in atomic detail on a computer.
Getting back to your question, though, a virus is different from a "living" organism, in that it requires another living organism to replicate. You might protest, saying that animals eat other living organisms, but they don't *need* other living organisms - your quarter pounder with cheese was living at one point, but isn't at the time you eat it. Even if your food is alive when you eat it, your digestive system does a respectable job of killing everything off and breaking things down before taking up and using it.
On a more technical level, most if not all viruses do not contain the enzymes needed to do a full cycle of replication on their genome (some exceptions, like non-retrovirus RNA viruses), nor to do the DNA-mRNA transcription, nor (most importantly) to do the mRNA->protein translation. Nor is there much in the way of genes for nutrient aquisition or processing. There is little to nothing going on in a virus particle, metabolism wise. It's merely a packet of genes, ready to take advantage of some other organisms accumulated nutrients and information processing machinery.
The "only" thing which makes the life/not-life distinction fuzzy is that it is capable of directing production of additional copies of itself, such that it fufils all the requirements for evolution*. I put "only" in quotes, because it is a pretty big thing, and is arguably the only requirement for something to be "life."
As you could possibly guess, I come down on the "not life" side, but there is a whole lot of "but WTF does it matter if it's living or not? A virus as a virus is interesting enough in it's own right. Life/Not life is an rather arbitrary distinction anyway" in there too.
*If you don't believe in Evolution, don't bother wasting time to understand this post. Just consult your holy book as to if a virus is alive.
Simulation of an entire lifeform, my ass! (Score:5, Informative)
And that word 'lifeform' - it brings the quality of the reporting down to the level of Star Trek psychobabble. Try 'organsim', or even 'virus', next time.
Re:Life is not a binary distinction (Score:2, Informative)
you've obviously never heard one of bush's speeches
Re:Simulating intelligence? (Score:2, Informative)
Aha, but your given is anything but, and hence your asumption isn't so safe.
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Informative)
They're relying on their host for basic life functions, such as reproduction (OK, bad example as you have flowers/bees and so on) and even respiration. Every life form relies on something external for a food source, that's fair enough, but if you call a virus alive then you might as well say genes are life forms in their own right.
Re:Computational Biology BS (Score:1, Informative)
"If we can't simulate how the big bang happened, how can we ever hope to simulate a pendulum, which was created from the big bang?"
True, simulating the folding of a protein is a difficult task. But simulating how a protein behaves once it is already folded is a much easier task. The important thing to note is that they aren't simulating the "folding" of a virus, they are simulating atom movements within an already assembled virus.
It's true that they don't represent all the atomic details of the system, and you could argue that this means they aren't truely "simulating" the virus, but in that case, you'd have to argue we couldn't "simulate" a pendulum or a plane flight, because we aren't modeling the thermal fluctuations of the atoms in the metal, or the boorish behavior of the passenger in seat 23F.
(But I agree - the exercise was a whole lot of flash with little substance. Just a demonstration that it could be done, with little scientific merit. -- Hey, much like the Moon Landings!)
Re:Simulating intelligence? (Score:3, Informative)
The math represented thus becomes quite different, and, given a simple extrapolation of accelerating returns regarding computing power per cost, show that within a decade we *will* have the processing ability to create a functional digital brain at the complexity level of a human brain. This doesn't automatically mean that model will be instantly intelligent, but, when you factor in our accelerating understanding and ability to model abstract thought processes in software on top of our ability to model the physical functions of the brain, it is not unreasonable to suppose that we will produce true digital intelligence by way of a bottom-up simulation of brain processes. Add in the accelerating returns principle, and, within a few years after that, our digital model wil have processing power thousands and then millions of time that of a single brain, which in turn, even before sentience can be used to help us refine our behavioral models of thought processes-- and the likelyhood that it will cross the threshold of intelligence approaches certainty.
It is only a matter of time, and the surprising thing is, if one simply projects the curve outward, how soon it will likely happen.
Why virii are not alive (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Simulating intelligence? (Score:3, Informative)
"Anything created must necessarily be inferior to the essence of the creator."
-- Claude Shouse (shouse@macomw.ARPA)
"Einstein's mother must have been one heck of a physicist."
-- Joseph C. Wang (joe@athena.mit.edu)
Re:Not virii, viruses (Score:1, Informative)
Re:"life" is a lousy line to draw (Score:2, Informative)
Viruses do not have a metabolism.....
Re:"life" is a lousy line to draw (Score:2, Informative)