[jes5199]

our relationship to computation got weird when we moved to digital computers. Like, I don’t think anyone was saying “life is like millions of slide-rules solving logarithms in parallel”. but now that computers are de-materialized, they can be a metaphor for pretty much anything

[mannykannot]

Good point - maybe the analogy to computation arises simply because digital computation and the synthesis of DNA, RNA and proteins are all performed by discrete-state machines?

[jes5199]

does DNA/RNA keep state other than the position of the read head?

[mannykannot]

Not as far as I know, but that is not saying much.