23:10: "Cancer is not one specific disease. Cancer is actually many diseases put together. In fact, cancer is many rare diseases -- if you take cancer to the limit, it's likely the case that the same cancer has never occurred twice.<p>"If you look at the genetic footprint of cancer, even within the same patient -- as I'll explain in just a moment -- you get very different cancers from the same originating source. And I'll explain why that is. That's why this sort of very information-driven approach to curing cancer is absolutely critical."<p>26:29: "... the genome has syntax. And in fact, it has a semantics. And beyond that, it has an instruction set too."<p>30:00: "So when you're fighting cancer, you're fighting evolution itself inside your own body."
Talking about that, I feel obliged again to mention the work of Damien Woods, Yannick Rondelez and Nicolas Schabanel who are actually assembling DNA tiles implementing wang tile gliders (a la game of life) and then "higher" primitives up to a nano Turing complete machine.<p>An odd feeling to watch his slides (I don't have them as of now sadly)
Link to another lecture by this lecture, mentioned mid op, where the lecturer live codes an abstract interpreter like the one discussed in the op<p><a href="https://youtu.be/POvX4hYIoxg" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/POvX4hYIoxg</a>
I was at Curry On! but missed that talked. Everyone kept telling how good it was so I watched it as soon as it was put online.<p>While Matt's (medical) story is truly inspiring, the link with the other (CS) part is really dubious to say the least.<p>Still, it shows how transposing ideas from a discipline to another can yield leap and bounds advances, although in this particular case it was fortunate that this happened very quickly after the technology to do this became available.
A fun recent example mitigating the halting problem came from an affectionate troll level(o) in mario maker<p>I'm unsure whether the underlying implementation uses approximation techniques, as the op suggests, or if Nintendo simply identified potential halting offenders and added a layer of checks to overcome the intractable issue<p>note: the clip is loud and includes the player yelling fuck; in case that offends.. that said, the whole level playthrough is a lot of fun<p>(o) <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg4OjsC3Ty8&t=1102" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg4OjsC3Ty8&t=1102</a>