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Re:An ecologist who wants to map everything by mlthoughts2018 on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @08:56PM (#21077148)
When I was in middle school I first learned the basic idea of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic and my instantaneous first idea was that we should assign a unique prime number to each attribute that a biological entity can have, and then multiplying together the prime factors for all the characteristics would give the unique integer ID for that biological entity.

So if having a limb is “7” then some creature with three limbs gets 7^3 in its prime factorization, and so on.

Obviously it is an incredibly stupid idea, but 12-year-old me was quite impressed by the thought of it.

Re:An ecologist who wants to map everything by erreJulian on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @10:03PM (#21077478)
It is, in a way, the idea behind Borge's “Analytical Language of John Wilkins”: https://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.ht...
Re:An ecologist who wants to map everything by magneticnorth on Thursday September 26, 2019 @10:34AM (#21081219)
It is a neat idea!

This is very close to how Godel numbering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering) works, to give every possible mathematical formula in a fixed language its own unique number.

Re:An ecologist who wants to map everything by earthicus on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @11:55PM (#21078019)
Lol, that's a great story; if only that sort of thing was practical, how much more fun life would be :-) I actually had the opportunity to do something similar not too long ago. I'm a beginner learning to program and I had a little puzzle that I got from my grandma ~15 years ago. You have a tower of blocks with symbols on them, and have to arrange the blocks so that all of the symbols on each side are distinct [1]. The problem was small enough that I could just model each symbol as a prime and check uniqueness by seeing of the product was equal to 2 * 3 * 5 * 7 * 11 * 13.

[1] https://imgur.com/vTZotGC

Re:An ecologist who wants to map everything by kmill on Thursday September 26, 2019 @02:51AM (#21078830)
Whether or not it's incredibly stupid, you're in good company: it occurred to Leibniz, too. Search for 'prime' at https://pron.github.io/posts/computation-logic-algebra-pt1 (though for him the unique IDs were for concepts rather than individuals).
Re:An ecologist who wants to map everything by ovi256 on Thursday September 26, 2019 @05:55AM (#21079569)
You've rediscovered one-hot binary encoding with prime numbers :)
Re:An ecologist who wants to map everything by pvaldes on Thursday September 26, 2019 @03:22AM (#21078950)
species complex, hybrids, mimicry, evolutive convergence, chimaeras... Life is too complicated and exhuberant to reduce it to a math formula
Re:An ecologist who wants to map everything by adrianN on Thursday September 26, 2019 @07:56AM (#21080078)
No it's not. It is likely too complicated to reduce to a formula that you can evaluate in reasonable time, or too complicated to measure with sufficient accuracy to even know what numbers to put into that formula, but life still follows the laws of physics and to the best of our knowledge they can be expressed in mathematical language.