Your position is clear, it’s just that I don’t agree with it. I don’t think that human biochemistry has been figured out (e.g. consider protein structure). I also think that modeling human body at the chemistry level is not a problem of insufficient computing power. It’s a problem of insufficient knowledge.
Non-trivial hypothesis generation is very hard to do via software which is one of the reasons why IBM’s Watson haven’t produced a cure for cancer already. Humans are still useful in some roles :-/
The structure of a protein is determined by the known laws of physics, other compounds in the solution, and protein’s formula (which is a trivial translation of the genetic code for that protein). But it is very computationally expensive to simulate for a large, complicated protein. Watson is a very narrow machine that tries to pretend at answering by using a large database of answers. AFAIK it can’t even do trivial new answers (what is the velocity of a rock that fell from the height of 131.5 meters? Wolfram Alpha can answer this, but it is just triggered by the keyword ‘fell’ and ‘height’)
Your position is clear, it’s just that I don’t agree with it. I don’t think that human biochemistry has been figured out (e.g. consider protein structure). I also think that modeling human body at the chemistry level is not a problem of insufficient computing power. It’s a problem of insufficient knowledge.
Non-trivial hypothesis generation is very hard to do via software which is one of the reasons why IBM’s Watson haven’t produced a cure for cancer already. Humans are still useful in some roles :-/
The structure of a protein is determined by the known laws of physics, other compounds in the solution, and protein’s formula (which is a trivial translation of the genetic code for that protein). But it is very computationally expensive to simulate for a large, complicated protein. Watson is a very narrow machine that tries to pretend at answering by using a large database of answers. AFAIK it can’t even do trivial new answers (what is the velocity of a rock that fell from the height of 131.5 meters? Wolfram Alpha can answer this, but it is just triggered by the keyword ‘fell’ and ‘height’)