Fast forward to 2017 and a group of nerds did the same thing with tick-tack-toe.
I was actually talking about this sort of thing last week-end with a friend. I didn’t exactly do what you describe but I did wire up a device back in 1964 that played tic-tac-toe and could not be beaten. If it did not win, it would play to a draw. I had to figure out all the possibilities and wire it up that way. I did the learning that your devices are programmed to do.
Matter works in a similar fashion, determined patterns that do not change unless acted upon by an external organizing principle. Randomness is the default position when one doen’t know the mechanisms, all the variables and/or the relationships that are involved.
the process of creating order and knowledge and information (all central to what the genome does for living things), starts with no order, no knowledge, and no information.
There is an order to the fundamental processes that govern material interactions. And, the machines described above, have a final cause - playing, learning and winning the game. And, that cause imposes an order that determines the various possible outcomes.
Before we consider how differences appeared between the genomes of different kinds of living being, let’s imagine the construction of the base pairs that make up the DNA molecule - purine adenine and that of the pyrimidine thymine, such that they can be paired, along with the same process involving the pyrimidine cytosine always pairing with the purine guanine.
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Working in a lab it becomes clear that even under the strictest conditions, things don’t happen as they should. That chemical processes themselves not under the influence of an external ordering principle caused these molecules to appear, is really a stretch that to my mind lacks any credibility, although such beliefs have been with us since prehistory.
Lets move forward to how the combination of these base pairs are said to happen merely by vrtue of their intrinsic chemical properties. Somehow serendipitously these are supposed to have random additions that work and are crucial to the formatiion of proteins that would provide new structures and enzymes, which allow for the diversxity necessary for the tissues and organs that constitute a body.
The process from gene to protein is complex and completely controlled within each cell. It begins with transcription - the transfer of information that is contained in the gene’s DNA to form RNA in the nucleus. Messenger RNA contains the information for the construction of a protein. In the cytoplasm, it interacts with ribosomes, where the reading of the mRNA bases. A codon, which is a sequence of three bases, codes for one specific amino acid, as a constituent part of the of protein. It is transfer RNA that assembles the protein which continues until a “stop” codon, a sequence of three bases not coding for an amino acid is reached.
I’m going to stop for now.
