Physics: Feels close. Hm… biological life as a self-compiler on a physics substrate?
DNA or gametes seem really close to a “quine” for this: plug it into the right part of an active compiler, and it outputs many instances of its own code + a customized compiler. Although it crashes/gets rejected if the compiler is too different (ex: plant & animal have different regulatory markers & different sugar-related protein modifications).
I don’t have a fixed word for the “custom compiler” thing yet (“optimized compiler”? “coopted compiler”? “spawner”? “Q-spawner”?). I have seen analogous stuff in other places, and I’m tempted to call it a somewhat common pattern, though. (ex: vertically-transmitted CS compiler corruption, or viruses producing tumor micro-environments that are more favorable to replicating the virus)
It’s sorta non-obvious. I kinda poked at this for hours, at some point? It took a while for me to settle on a model I liked for this.
Here’s the full notes for what I came up with.
Physics: Feels close. Hm… biological life as a self-compiler on a physics substrate?
DNA or gametes seem really close to a “quine” for this: plug it into the right part of an active compiler, and it outputs many instances of its own code + a customized compiler. Although it crashes/gets rejected if the compiler is too different (ex: plant & animal have different regulatory markers & different sugar-related protein modifications).
I don’t have a fixed word for the “custom compiler” thing yet (“optimized compiler”? “coopted compiler”? “spawner”? “Q-spawner”?). I have seen analogous stuff in other places, and I’m tempted to call it a somewhat common pattern, though. (ex: vertically-transmitted CS compiler corruption, or viruses producing tumor micro-environments that are more favorable to replicating the virus)