

AI solves complex biology problem from scratch - rbii
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/100195-ai-solves-complex-biology-problem-from-scratch

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giardini
Fanboys of the latecomer software Eureqa have been seeking press lately in
various venues.

Software like this goes back decades: Lenat's AM and EURISKO, Simon et al's
various BACON programs, Koza's genetic programming, Muggleton's excellent ILP
softwares, etc. are all examples. Eureqa is based on genetic algorithms, IIRC.
Nothing new, but another application, in this case experiment planning.

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tambourine_man
God I hate the mobile version of extremetech.

Sorry, off topic, but this overengenering trend of reinventing everything in
JavaScript is a pain.

All this trouble for making your content presentation and interaction worse
and less accessible.

It would be a much better experience if you just let my perfectly capable
browser simply scroll your site.

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mrsebastian
Hey -- yes, the mobile version does seem to polarize readers somewhat. Some
like it, some hate it (it's OnSwipe, by the way -- received a fair bit of
press, when it was launched earlier this year).

If you have some specific functionality issues with it, lemme know and I'll
file them as bugs. I think it just inherently has some usability issues, tho'
:(

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tambourine_man
Hi, Here are some bugs on my iPhone 3G:

Screen flickers between the black and white (background/foreground) while
scrolling.

Since you can't scroll to an arbitrary position (you are locked into some jump
stops), sometimes the block of text is just too big and you have to choose
between reading the beginning or end of the paragraph (or trying to read while
scrolling, peeking under your thumb).

Top-leftmost “Contents” badge covers, ironically, the content underneath it.

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unwind
This quote:

    
    
        “Biology is more complex than astronomy or physics or chemistry,”
        says John Wikswo, a Vanderbilt professor who worked on ABE.
    

Caught my eye. Unfortunately, it also put me off reading the article. Isn't
biology an application of physics and chemistry? What else is there? Sorry if
I'm sounding hopelessly naïve ...

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DevX101
Meh, his point is arguable, but could see how reasonable minds can disagree.

Understanding new biology can be akin to reverse engineering a really complex
piece of software, except you have you have an editor that's cumbersome and
hard to use, you can't see the entire codebase, and running the program once
could take months. There are some functions in the code that you don't what
they do. For the functions that you _think_ you understand, they may modify
variables in other functions unbeknownst to you. In software, you can just add
a 'NOT/!' to change the effect of a conditional. In biology this could be an
involved experiment taking a very long time.

So yeah, biology can be pretty complex, but physics certainly has its fair
share of challenges.

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dahjelle
For the interested, this appears to be [one of] the original paper[s]:
[http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/wiks...](http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/wikswo-
lipson.pdf)

