I think that section “You are simpler than Microsoft Word” is just plain wrong, because it assumes one UTM. But Kolmogorov complexity is defined only up to the choice of UTM.
Genome is only as simple as it is allowed by the rest of cell mechanism, like ribosomal decoding mechanism and protein folding. Humans are simple only relative to space of all possible organisms that can be built on Earth biochemistry. Conversely, Word is complex only relatively to all sets of x86 processor instructions or all sets of C programs, or whatever you used for definition of Word size. To properly compare complexity of both things, you need to translate from one language to another. How large should be genome of organism capable to run Word? It seems reasonable that simulation of human organism up to nucleotides will be very large if we write it in C, and I think genome of organism capable to run Word just as good as modern PC will be much larger than human genome.
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.
But then how to define complexity, where to stop context of a thing? Also, complexity without meaning is just chaos, so complexity assumes a goal, a negentropy, a life.
example of complexity context definition issue: Computers only exist in a world were humans created them, should human complexity be included in computer complexity? Or can we envision a reality where computers appeared without humans?
Unlike Word, the human genome is self-hosting. That means that it is paying fair and square for any complexity advantage it might have—if Microsoft found that the x86 was not expressive enough to code in a space-efficient manner, they could likewise implement more complex machinery to host it.
Of course, the core fact is that the DNA of eukaryotes looks memory efficient compared to the bloat of word.
There was a time when Word was shipped on floppy disks. From what I recall, it came on multiple floppies, but on the order of ten, not a thousand. With these modern CD-ROMs and DVDs, there is simply less incentive to optimize for size. People are not going to switch away from word to libreoffice if the latter was only a gigabyte.
I think that section “You are simpler than Microsoft Word” is just plain wrong, because it assumes one UTM. But Kolmogorov complexity is defined only up to the choice of UTM.
Genome is only as simple as it is allowed by the rest of cell mechanism, like ribosomal decoding mechanism and protein folding. Humans are simple only relative to space of all possible organisms that can be built on Earth biochemistry. Conversely, Word is complex only relatively to all sets of x86 processor instructions or all sets of C programs, or whatever you used for definition of Word size. To properly compare complexity of both things, you need to translate from one language to another. How large should be genome of organism capable to run Word? It seems reasonable that simulation of human organism up to nucleotides will be very large if we write it in C, and I think genome of organism capable to run Word just as good as modern PC will be much larger than human genome.
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.
Exactly my thoughts reading the article.
But then how to define complexity, where to stop context of a thing?
Also, complexity without meaning is just chaos, so complexity assumes a goal, a negentropy, a life.
example of complexity context definition issue:
Computers only exist in a world were humans created them, should human complexity be included in computer complexity? Or can we envision a reality where computers appeared without humans?
Unlike Word, the human genome is self-hosting. That means that it is paying fair and square for any complexity advantage it might have—if Microsoft found that the x86 was not expressive enough to code in a space-efficient manner, they could likewise implement more complex machinery to host it.
Of course, the core fact is that the DNA of eukaryotes looks memory efficient compared to the bloat of word.
There was a time when Word was shipped on floppy disks. From what I recall, it came on multiple floppies, but on the order of ten, not a thousand. With these modern CD-ROMs and DVDs, there is simply less incentive to optimize for size. People are not going to switch away from word to libreoffice if the latter was only a gigabyte.