flâneur

Could a computer scientist build a brain?

stankerstjens.github.io · 7,903 words · saved by 1 readers

How does a brain wire itself, starting from a single cell, using only the information encoded in a genome? We pose this as an engineering problem.

Stan Kerstjens & Anthony M. Zador Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory DOI10.5281/zenodo.21938144 14 August 2026 Correspondence: kerstje@cshl.edu How does a brain wire itself, starting from a single cell, using only the information encoded in a genome? We pose this as an engineering problem: Write a program that a single cell executes to build itself into a brain. The program must be small enough to fit in a genome, and fast enough to finish within developmental time. A computer scientist who knows little about biology quickly realizes why the obvious strategies, which developmental biology has…

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