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.

Image source: Miguel Romero, Adobe Stock

Originally published in thereader.mitpress.mit.edu by Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Image source: Miguel Romero, Adobe Stock 

In 1994, a strange, pixelated machine came to life on a computer screen. It read a string of instructions, copied them, and built a clone of itself — just as the Hungarian-American Polymath John von Neumann had predicted half a century earlier. It was a striking demonstration of a profound idea: that life, at its core, might be computational.

This article is adapted from Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s book “What Is Intelligence?” An open access edition of the book is available here.

Although this is seldom fully appreciated, von Neumann was one of the first to establish a deep link between life and computation. Reproduction, like computation, he showed, could be carried out by machines following coded instructions. In his model, based on Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, self-replicating systems read and execute instructions much like DNA does: “if the next instruction is the codon CGA, then add an arginine to the protein under construction.” It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a “program” — that is literally the case.

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