News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Spiegelman's Monster. Parent comment

Re:Spiegelman's Monster by Houshalter on Monday June 06, 2016 @12:48AM (#11844722)
Well the article says its not even self replicating. It requires humans to do much of the work of providing specific machinery and materials that it needs to make copies of itself.

But it also doesn't do much. That's a nebulous, hard to pin down statement. But I mean it doesn't have all the complex machinery and behaviors of living cells. It's static and kind of just floats around. Until things happen to bump into it and stick.

It's not fundamentally different than a virus. Which are also self replicating, but I don't think they are considered "living".

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spiegelman's Monster by nickledave on Monday June 06, 2016 @12:58AM (#11844752)
Heh, we must have been posting at the same time. Good point that the RNA monster doesn't do much; even some bacteria can "smell" chemicals and move along a gradient, a "behavior" that makes us think of them as alive. I wonder if you could get behavior like that with just rna
[ Parent | on HN ]