...a very distinguished computer scientist assesses the power of computation to understand evolution...
Best, Jeremy B ------ Jeremy Butterfield: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Butterfield Homepage: http://trin-hosts.trin.cam.ac.uk/fellows/butterfield/ Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 1TQ -------------- Leslie Valiant will be giving a talk titled "The Computational Universe" on Monday 13 October 2014, 18:00-19:00 at the Bristol-Myers-Squibb Lecture theatre, Department of Chemistry. Fore more info: http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/51925 p.s. Here's the abstract: The idea that computation has its own laws and limitations emerged in the 1930s. Some of the early computing pioneers, most notably Turing and von Neumann, already understood that this idea had far reaching implications beyond technology. It offered a new way of looking at the world, in terms of computational processes. Turing and von Neumann themselves pursued this perspective in such areas as genetics, biological development, cognition and the brain. There has been much progress in the intervening years in understanding computation. The question that arises for our generation is how to exploit this increasing knowledge to obtain insights into the natural world that cannot be obtained otherwise. This talk will focus on biological evolution approached from this standpoint. The scientific question is to determine the molecular mechanism of biological evolution, to a level of specificity that it can be simulated by computer, and to understand why this mechanism can do the remarkable things that it has done within the time that has been available. We argue that the tools needed to approach this come from machine learning, the field that studies how mechanisms that achieve complex functionality can arise by a process of adaptation rather than design. --- Cambridge Centre for Quantum Information and Foundations Group Mailing List Requests for removal should be emailed to [email protected] _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
