Schrodinger in "What is Life?" made a good guess about the nature of genetic material as copolymers before it was discovered, except he speculated that they would be "aperiodic crystals", which usually connotes 2- or 3-dimensional structure. (Normally, at least nowadays, if you wanted the audience to understand 1-dimensional structure, you would say "polymer".)
I read somewhere that quasicrystals (atomic matter with quasiperiodicity) can be thought of as appropriately angled slices through higher-dimensional regular crystals, projected back down to 3 dimensions.
I think the kind of quasiperiodicity the aperiodic tile has is the kind where the range of possible solutions is narrow. One of the other systems of tiling like that has the property that, if you put a single disallowed connection anywhere, then the rest of the pattern is determined uniquely and you can always find the next point where there's only one option for where to put the tile, without having to explore any larger combinations. That puts some limits on how much work it would take to explore combinations in the more usual case, when you haven't put any defects in. Genome space seems less narrow than that.
no subject
I read somewhere that quasicrystals (atomic matter with quasiperiodicity) can be thought of as appropriately angled slices through higher-dimensional regular crystals, projected back down to 3 dimensions.
I think the kind of quasiperiodicity the aperiodic tile has is the kind where the range of possible solutions is narrow. One of the other systems of tiling like that has the property that, if you put a single disallowed connection anywhere, then the rest of the pattern is determined uniquely and you can always find the next point where there's only one option for where to put the tile, without having to explore any larger combinations. That puts some limits on how much work it would take to explore combinations in the more usual case, when you haven't put any defects in. Genome space seems less narrow than that.