🚀 go-pugleaf

On 24 Dec 2001 08:37:35 -0800, Swarat Chaudhuri <swarat_c@lycos.com> wrote:
>> >>its code.  Thus, genes are abstractions, being encoded in the DNA,
>> >>as decoded by the cellular machinery.  Discussion of different kinds
>> >>of sequences is irrelevant, in this particular context -- that's just
>> >>arguing about the form of encoding, when that point is that genetic
>> >>information is encoded -- anyhow.
> 
> This doesn't make any sense at all. Of course, genetic information is
> encoded (wow!), and the whole point of my question was: is there any
> characterization of the minimum information content of strings (or
> more complicated structures) carrying such infromation? In order to
> answer such a question, we shall definitely need to take into account
> the _precise_ form of encoding. In the first place, even to calculate
> the Shannon entropy, we need this. If we are to talk about Kolmogorov
> complexity of such strings, we _most_ definitely need to know the
> kinds of encoding that are possible in the natural world. For the
> uninitiated, this means: what is the size of the smallest Turing
> machine that can churn out a DNA string? Computing Kolmogorov
> complexity is, of course, undecidable, but there is some work going
> that tries to find approximations.

Suppose we find that number or some approximation thereof in some model. 

What then?