Blogs are abuzz with the news that E. coli can solve classic math puzzles like the Burnt Pancake Puzzle. The paper itself is available for free here.
Judging from the Frankensteinian anxiety this news seems to be triggering, people must think that life is normally not capable of the logic that we're familiar with in computers. In fact, however, E. coli was carrying out a natural sort of computation long before some undergrads starting tinkering with it. In Microcosm, I show how the genes that build E. coli's flagella act like a noise filter circuit. (Here's a new paper on the digital control in E. coli.) What's interesting about the Burnt-Pancake E. coli is that it's solving our problems, not its own.
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To kick off this book club discussion, I want to explain how I ended up the past couple years obsessing over E. coli. If you don't know much about E. coli, it may sound like a strange thing to do. But the time I spent in this microbe's intellectual company was deeply enlightening.
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Bill Gates's paper he wrote way back before he dropped out of college is on this exact topic. That paper address the computational bounds on solving the problem for a stack of N burnt pancakes. He wrote the paper with Prof. Papadimitriou, who is currently at Berkeley. Consequently Bill gates have a Erdos number of 4.
Biology doing computation... it doesn't always come up with 'what is six times nine'. (DNA would have loved this story.)
Hi Carl,
I enjoyed your 'What Is a Species?' in June 2008 Scientific American.
What do you think of Jeff Hecht, 'The Neanderthal correlation', "A quetion of breeding" in Nature v543 n7149 p562 22 May 2008?
Very cool.