Hacker News Reader

Comment by inciampati | Hacker News Reader

In biology every single protein (or other biochemical entity) can be thought of as it's own core. It's parallel in an amazing and beautiful way. Or the most boring way possible. It just depends on if you are a computer scientist or biologist how you would see it.

View on HN

There are to this day computer science researchers having conniptions about the impossibility of massively parallel lock-free architectures based on eventual consistency. Yet literally all they must do is open their eyes and see the truth!

It helps that our brains and bodies are analog. It doesn't matter if a particular variable is changed by different factors at the same time. The total magnitude of all the changes is far more important. Thus, lock-free.

Kind of like CRDT (conflict free replicated data types for the biologists amongst us).

Protiens? Every particle in every atom is solving exponential-time problems constantly, in parallel. That's the quantum chemistry perspective. :)

physical reality seems fairly good at optimising for local energy-minimal solutions

another stupid perspective: think of how many clever algorithms and how much computational hardware would be necessary to simulate a small rock from a QM level up. now, what if there was a bespoke piece of super-custom application-specific technology that could efficiently simulate that small rock? there is: it's the rock itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com