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assembly theory

jason.ml · 1,089 words · saved by 1 readers

Imagine you're a budding astrobiologist looking for life in the universe. You see 1,000,000 brand new 2025 Toyota Corollas on Mars. That would be very weird. Assembly theory would have you conclude that some "life-like" process made those cars — which they understand to be a process that has "memory" and "selection." The intuition here is that there is a vast number of ways that those screws and bolts and rods and plastic etc. could be "assembled." Seeing an object that complex once wouldn't be a slam dunk (after all, we have beautifully complex snowflakes, or ground formation). But seeing it again and again suggests that some process which narrows down from the infinite space of possibilities ("selection") and the mechanism to retain the instructions and repeat the process must exist — life. Assembly theory quantifies elegant intuition of repeated complexity, thereby providing us a testable theory. Assembly theorists experimentally observe that if the "assembly index" of any object (t

assembly theory How can we measure life? Assembly theorists say "look for repeated complexity. " Imagine you're a budding astrobiologist looking for life in the universe. You see 1,000,000 brand new 2025 Toyota Corollas on Mars. That would be very weird. Assembly theory would have you conclude that some "life-like" process made those cars — which they understand to be a process that has "memory" and "selection." The intuition here is that there is a vast number of ways that those screws and bolts and rods and plastic etc. could be "assembled." Seeing an object that complex once wouldn't be a s

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