The Conversation Publishes on Pattern Mapping: Mysticism || AI || Biology
Article excerpt:
‘Coding’ everywhere you look
Like the golem, robots, androids and even AI are powered with recombinations of elemental units. Instead of Hebrew letters, the units are ones and zeros. In both instances, the specific permutation makes all the difference – and all these creations have inspired speculative stories about what happens when familiar building blocks are rearranged.
The creature in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” arises as an assortment of body parts. Novelist Margaret Atwood’s “Crakers” are humans 2.0, bioengineered from reshuffled genes. In science fiction writer Ted Chiang’s novella “Seventy-Two Letters,” which draws from golem legends, dolls move according to the sequence of letters on a parchment placed in their backs.
Such patterns are not just the stuff of fiction, nor are they limited to computer science. Permutative “coding” is all around. Music notes are arranged to form a melody; gene sequences are combined to form an organism. In all living things – owls, geckos, people, roses – the instructions encased in DNA comprise recombinations of the same four nucleobase pairs.
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