Energy/randomness in DNA processing

[Vkothii]

DNA as a program, must also specify its own "start" and "end" statements to the processing elements, or those cellular constituents that represent the processor, insofar as DNA is conceived as a stored program.

DNA is self-limiting, like any program written in a language for a modern algorithmic machine, i.e. a binary computer. DNA tends to "randomise", due to background noise, and due to active processes that try to attenuate that noise (maintain the DNA "signal"), apart from mitosis/meiosis and the intentional modulation of that same signal.

Is there a deeper connection between randomness and uncertainty (i.e. noise), the algorithmic halting problem, and the existence of Life and how it controls or directs energy toward information storage and transcription?

Edit: maybe this should be in Comp Sci or Phys & Math.

What I'm getting at here is if there are strings which are "functional" - assuming most are not, and there's a way to generate or specify a given string - but have an indeterminate halting point (or set of conditions which when met will halt a given machine), how different is such a scenario to that of early forms of proto-life? Something must have persisted and eventually replicated or copied its programming, something that was essentially strings of abstract bits in some kind of chemical processing system.

 

[quantum_wave]

I wonder if the first replacation had a "stop" point. If the start point was there but the stop point was inconclusive, early replication could have had rapid diversification.

I've always just attributed it to iteration upon iteration of that "chemical processing system". But recently microbial life has been discovered in places previously thought uninhabital by life; hot deep sea vents, deep within the mantal of the Earth, etc.

Such discoveries spark the thought that life may have even gotten the "persistent" replication chemestry deep in the mantal and evolved and moved toward and finally to the surface. Also, if life persists in such hostile environments would it need to be generated and evolved on Earth or could it have arived from meteors?

DNA as a program encoded into the molecular structure that replicates itself is fact, but the heritage of that ability to replicate can only be speculated. I am going to speculate that it can survive and endure much harsher conditions than we have discovered to date. If that is so, the heritage of the ability to replicate could be much longer than the duration of Earth's history. Do you agree?

 

[Vkothii]

Replication, or the enabling of persistence. DNA is just a particularly stable kind of polymer, and RNA is presumed to be the presursor, or Life was RNA-based initially.
But before actual prokaryotes arose, there must have been various (possibly almost infinite) kinds of "chemical computations" going on. The idea is that a substrate existed, and the carbon-based chemistry that evolved on it did so because, given the nature of the substrate and carbon chemistry, it was inevitable, given sufficient time (the fact there are now carbon based forms of life everywhere that "run" a similar program and use the same kind of evolved substrate attests to that).

So was it just a kind of combinatorial problem - i.e. an iterative or algorithmic kind of evolution involving millions of "programs", most of which halted? There wouldn't have been many examples of programs that did anything useful, and also managed to make a copy of themselves somehow. It suggests co-operation between different kinds of programs (programs being various kinds of organic and inorganic chemicals with a substrate of some kind).
And as you point out, Life can survive and reproduce at quite extreme depths and pressures. There's no reason it might have initially been extreme conditions that were needed.