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private_messaging comments on Genies and Wishes in the context of computer science - Less Wrong
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We have chemistry figured out, we don't have "making truly enormous computers to compute enough of that chemistry fast enough" figured out, or "computing chemistry a lot more efficiently" figured out. Does that make it clearer?
I am not entirely clear how do you imagine hypothesis generation happening on a computer, other than by either trying what sticks, or analytically finding the best hypothesis that works by working backwards from the data.
Your position is clear, it's just that I don't agree with it. I don't think that human biochemistry has been figured out (e.g. consider protein structure). I also think that modeling human body at the chemistry level is not a problem of insufficient computing power. It's a problem of insufficient knowledge.
Non-trivial hypothesis generation is very hard to do via software which is one of the reasons why IBM's Watson haven't produced a cure for cancer already. Humans are still useful in some roles :-/
The structure of a protein is determined by the known laws of physics, other compounds in the solution, and protein's formula (which is a trivial translation of the genetic code for that protein). But it is very computationally expensive to simulate for a large, complicated protein. Watson is a very narrow machine that tries to pretend at answering by using a large database of answers. AFAIK it can't even do trivial new answers (what is the velocity of a rock that fell from the height of 131.5 meters? Wolfram Alpha can answer this, but it is just triggered by the keyword 'fell' and 'height')