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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

I can imagine a world where you can simulate a simple organism like a worm without knowing how to simulate the cells that make it. This is because emergent behaviour of complex systems can be much simpler than the constituent parts of that system (temperature vs. knowing particle velocities).

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I can write a program today that can simulate a worms "emergent behavior" without simulating the cells. Maybe a little 3D model that wriggles around. I can even do a human!

But I think what we're looking for here is something closer to emulation. In the same way that video game console emulators seek to reproduce the exact bugs that the original hardware produced - the value here does not come from abstracting away the lowest levels of behavior.

> the value here does not come from abstracting away the lowest levels of behavior

I totally agree.

How are you going to simulate the administering of a medicinal molecule? Or the knocking out of a gene?

My modelling the relevant parts of the worm that are involved in these processes.

You don't need an atomistic DFT simulator to get a good enough simulation of fluid dynamics, enough to design jets or rockets that go into space.

> modelling the relevant parts of the worm that are involved in these processes.

You mean cell chemistry?

It seems to me that if you can fully simulate a worm you're probably only an order of magnitude of difficulty away from a person, but to get there you need to have crossed dozens across many domains.

But none of that means you should take a drug bc someone’s elaborately technologized guess is that it’ll be okay

there's https://openworm.org/ for simulating a c. elegans, but think you're underestimating the complexities

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