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by rsync
3539 days ago
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"I don't for a moment believe that Dwarf Fortress contains a true 10MB of irreducibly complex behavioural code. Rather this is simply an indication that our computer languages and compression systems are much less efficient than what nature uses for DNA." You can test an information stream for entropy and you can also determine whether there is any entropy left in a compressed information stream. So while I think we should certainly respect the accumulated wisdom and refinement that trillions of cell divisions have stored up over the eons, it's not obvious that "nature" has better compression than we do. |
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I don't think that measures the thing that needs to be measured here. Kolmogorov complexity is famously uncomputable; the output of a pseudo-random number generator will be high-entropy but "really" only contains a tiny amount of information (the initial seed).
And more to the point, DNA certainly contains more than 10MB of entropy; the claim is that most of this DNA is junk. Fair enough, but I expect the 10MB of DF code is also mostly junk: irrelevant details that the programmers were unnecessarily required to specify or the compiler picked out, rather than actually expressing the details of behaviour.