Given two sets of DNA, what does it take to computationally "grow" that person from a fertilised egg and see what they become? [closed]

Posted by Nicholas Hill on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Nicholas Hill
Published on 2012-09-06T12:46:37Z Indexed on 2012/09/06 15:49 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 215

My question is essentially entirely in the title, but let me add some points to prevent some "why on earth would you want to do that" sort of answers:

  • This is more of a mind experiment than an attempt to implement real software. For fun.

  • Don't worry about computational speed or the number of available memory bytes. Computers get faster and better all of the time.

  • Imagine we have two data files: Mother.dna and Father.dna. What else would be required? (Bonus point for someone who tells me approx how many GB each file will be, and if the size of the files are exactly the same number of bytes for everyone alive on Earth!)

  • There would ideally need to be a way to see what the egg becomes as it becomes a human adult. If you fancy, feel free to outline the design. I am initially thinking that there'd need to be some sort of volumetric voxel-based 3D environment for simulation purposes.

© Programmers or respective owner

Related posts about artificial-intelligence

Related posts about genetic-algorithms