The first entry on this list is McCulloch-Pitts nerve nets whose expressive power were analysed by S.C. Kleene [1]. In his article he coined the term "regular events" for the class of languages that could be expressed by nerve nets/finite automata, and this is where regular expressions got their name from. If you have ever thought the name was strange, rest assured that Kleene didn't actually like it either, he just couldn't think of something better at the time:<p><pre><code> > We shall presently describe a class of events which we will call "regular events" (We would welcome any suggestions as to a more descriptive term.*)
> [...]
> * McCulloch and Pitts use the term "prehensible," introduced rather differently; but since we did not understand their definition, we did not adopt the term.
</code></pre>
So, had McCulloch and Pitts been a bit clearer in their seminal paper, then maybe it would have been called "prehensible expressions" :).<p>[1] <a href="https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2008/RM704.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand...</a>
This maybe a rudimentary question, but if someone was going to study this at a university level, what would they study?<p>I ask because I'm starting my masters in CS, but I've also been going to workshops/events at a local citizen bio lab and really enjoying it. I'd really like to go deeper into the cross-section of CS and Bio, specifically the kinds of things listed in this repo (modeling biological phenomenon as formal systems, using computation to simulate those systems, etc.)<p>But when I look at potential programs to pursue after my CS course, I get a bit lost in all the different titles—bioinformatics, systems biology, computational biology, etc. It's hard for an outsider in the field to discern any meaningful delineation. Does anyone with experience in the field know what category of study these resources would fall under, from a university perspective?
I was wondering if there was any work in the field of evolving 'creatures' moving in a virtual space, beyond what Karl Sims did 23 years ago.
<a href="https://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html</a>
<a href="https://www.karlsims.com/galapagos/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.karlsims.com/galapagos/index.html</a><p>It would be nice if Karl Sims could open source it as it is really inspiring visual example in the field of Artificial Life, next to seeing the generations of metuselahs unfolding in Conway's game of life<p>Another interesting article in the field of Artificial Life:
<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03453.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03453.pdf</a>
A-Life 2020 is virtual this summer (Jul 13-18). For all interested in lifting the veil between its and bits ;)<p><a href="https://vermontcomplexsystems.org/events/ALIFE-2020/" rel="nofollow">https://vermontcomplexsystems.org/events/ALIFE-2020/</a>
Do you think that software should be architected as autonomous agents for it to scale infinitely? I watched an Alan Kay video [1] some time back. In the video, he had an argument about how software systems cannot scale unless the basis is the most complex "computation" system that we know -- that system being our own biological system.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs</a>
I love the neuron simulator linked under McCulloch and Pitts [0]. Very fun to play around with and build your own networks. Reminds me of Conway's Game of Life and Minecraft redstone.<p>0. <a href="https://github.com/prathyvsh/formal-systems-in-biology" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/prathyvsh/formal-systems-in-biology</a>