While I was trying to convince biochemists (I’m still trying) to use the Chemical concrete machine for a variety of goals, from bio-computing to understanding brains, Stephen Paul King came with an awesome suggestion, which evolved into the following idea:
The WWW is an artificial, human-made network and the Chemical concrete machine (chemlambda) is artificial, human-made, computing friendly chemistry. Let’s use the chemical concrete machine to awake the net by giving it a metabolism.
Together with Louis Kauffman, we are trying to make some fine mathematics with real world implications out of it. Care to join? Then send me or Stephen a message.
Here is a list of arguments in favor of this idea:
- it is much simpler to use a made-up, simplified chemistry on a network much simpler than brains
- both the WWW and the chemical concrete machine (which is Turing universal) belong to the same (computational) universe
- in silico experiments with WWW + chemlambda correspond to in vivo experiments with wet neural networks
- it is scalable
- may have lots of real life CS applications
- it’s mathematically friendly, come on pure mathematicians, you are needed
- it’s based on lambda calculus, so it’s already incredibly cool, as adepts of functional programming might confirm.
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Oh, don’t forget the logo of the chemlambda and graphic lambda calculus:
where you can see two lambdas arranged into a double helix. It’s better than this [source]:
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UPDATE: see the more recent post Fraglets, bionets, and the www with metabolism fro relevant research already done related to www with metabolism, which could be very useful.