To be fair, humans (as well as other eukaryotes) probably have the most complicated genomes relative to prokaryotes, and also it’s exponentially more difficult to evolve more complicated genomes that can’t be patched around, which the post explains.
A hot take is that I’d actually be surprised if the constant factor difference is larger than 1-10 megabytes in C, and the main bottleneck to simulating a human organism up to the nucleotide level is that we have way too little compute to do it, not because of Kolmogorov complexity reasons.
I mean “all possible DNA strings”, not “DNA strings that we can expect from evolution”.
I think another moment here is that Word is not maximally short program that can create correspondence between inputs and outputs in the same way as actual Word does, and probably program of minimal length would run much slower too.
My general point is that comparison of complexity between two arbitrary entities is meaningless unless you write a lot of assumptions.
I suspect the Minimal program that simulates Microsoft word starts out with a simulation of quantum mechanics, and locates within this simulation the branch of the quantum multiverse that contains human-ish programmers writing MS word. (Not our branch exactly. But a similar one)
I think another moment here is that Word is not maximally short program that can create correspondence between inputs and outputs in the same way as actual Word does, and probably program of minimal length would run much slower too.
Agree with this.
For truly arbitrary entities, I agree that comparisons are meaningless unless you write a lot of assumptions down.
To be fair, humans (as well as other eukaryotes) probably have the most complicated genomes relative to prokaryotes, and also it’s exponentially more difficult to evolve more complicated genomes that can’t be patched around, which the post explains.
A hot take is that I’d actually be surprised if the constant factor difference is larger than 1-10 megabytes in C, and the main bottleneck to simulating a human organism up to the nucleotide level is that we have way too little compute to do it, not because of Kolmogorov complexity reasons.
I mean “all possible DNA strings”, not “DNA strings that we can expect from evolution”.
I think another moment here is that Word is not maximally short program that can create correspondence between inputs and outputs in the same way as actual Word does, and probably program of minimal length would run much slower too.
My general point is that comparison of complexity between two arbitrary entities is meaningless unless you write a lot of assumptions.
I suspect the Minimal program that simulates Microsoft word starts out with a simulation of quantum mechanics, and locates within this simulation the branch of the quantum multiverse that contains human-ish programmers writing MS word. (Not our branch exactly. But a similar one)
Agree with this.
For truly arbitrary entities, I agree that comparisons are meaningless unless you write a lot of assumptions down.