Wednesday, April 29, 2020

The COVID Crisis – “Get your Turing Machines Here!”

So by now some of you are confused about where we are going with this.

I get that.

“Why”, I don’t hear you asking, because you never call me, “is Chris babbling on about Covid and these blessed Turing Machines?”.

I’ll tell you why, and if you have been reading these PDF epistles you will recall that I am predicting a government edict (regardless of nationality) that will force everybody to lodge their Genome into a database. Your genome is unique, so, of course, we will know you like you don’t know yourself.

Your Genome

Of course the civil rights crowd will protest, and then the government will concede that your genome is your property, that you own it, and only you can permit it to be shared. Copyright, sort of, although when was the last time anyone got fined for copying a music track from a cassette tape?

In consequence, you will submit a blood sample (spitting on a swab has gone out of fashion of late), and you will receive your genome in digital form. You will then submit this digital data to the government database quite voluntarily if, like me, you want to go on receiving your old age pension, or if, like everyone else in Bonavista, you want to go on receiving unemployment benefits.

So, just as the Canadian Passport Office allows you to submit a fake passport application based on a genuine driver’s license, so that you can get a fake driver’s license from the fake passport application submission (DO pay attention), so you will be able to fake your genome, which ought to be a lot of fun.

I got this off the web, so we know it must be true.

My genome sequence is 3,234.83 Mega-Base pairs.

What is a base pair? I believe it is two letters, A-T or G-C. Only those four letters are used, and only in those two configurations. That is, you can have an A-T pair or you can have a G-C pair.

Let’s try to keep this simple.

My DNA is, I believe, 3,234,830,000 base pairs in length. Each base-pair can be one of two pairs, so think of that as “0” (for an A-T) or “1” (for a G-C). In other words, think of it as 3,234,830,000 bits (binary digits) and we will get along just fine.

Turing Machines

You can look this up on the web. Alan M. Turing proposed a conceptual machine that could perform three simple operations on a conceptual tape:-

(1) Move one position to the Right and read the symbol under the read-write head.

(2) Move one position to the Left and read the symbol under the read-write head.

(3) Print a one or a zero.

You can see where this is going, right?

Here is a Turing Machine to print out the binary fraction that represents one-third. You can see the “P0” where it prints a zero and the “P1” where it prints a digit one.

A Turing machine that evaluates p is just as simple, and it runs forever. If you assigned a digit to every photon in the universe, you would run out of space and time.

So, suppose I run one of these machines, he suggested with an evil grin, and stopped the machine after 3,234,830,000 iterations. I would have a string of 3,234,830,000 binary digits which would, at first glance, fit all the requirements of a genome sequence.

The Plot Thickens

So, I think I am ready for the onslaught.

There are a few tricky points. For example, what if the binary equivalent of 22/7 turns out to be a genome typical of a weasel?

I have built a genome of 3,234,830,000 bits, or 404,353,750 bytes and uploaded it to my web site in case you want to take a look at it. (Later: Sorry; my FTP won’t allow me to u/l a 400MB file; maybe later)

If you would like a personalized copy of a genome, guaranteed unique, and almost guaranteed not to be that of a weasel, send $20 by eTransfer to me. I’ll email your genome to you as an attachment as soon as the government allows the Coffee Shop, Library, or Commons to re-open.

Quick Start

If you don’t trust computers because of viruses and so on, try rolling your own. I have pasted the code I used to create that file.

Sub Genome()

intFile = FreeFile

Open "B:Genome.txt" For Output As intFile

Dim lngFile As Long

lngLimit = 3234830000# / 8 / 80

For lngFile = 1 To lngLimit

strRecord = ""

For lngRecord = 1 To 80

lngByteTotal = 0

For lngByte = 1 To 8

intRnd = Rnd()

lngByteTotal = 2 * lngByteTotal + intRnd

Next lngByte

strRecord = strRecord & Chr(lngByteTotal)

Next lngRecord

Print #intFile, strRecord

Next lngFile

Close

End Sub

Note that the program code is a mere 549 characters, which was able to generate 414,466,048 bytes (or 3 234 830 000 bits) which was Turing’s point about p. If you used one photon per digit to write out Pi, you would run out of time and space. But a Turing Machine to write Pi takes about 500 digits only.

If you want a unique Genome, pop the Randomize Statement in the code; that command seeds the number generator with the date and time. It is most unlikely that you will be starting the program at the same time as Sally in Wichita.

Once you have downloaded my genome, or rolled your own, you will have a text file which you can open in Notepad, so that you don’t have to worry about viruses, which will put you a step above any politician. It will look something like this (above). “Gibberish!” you exclaim, “Greaves has gone barmy!!”.

Not at all. Greaves is just as sane as ever he was. The file is just a series of binary digits. Each set of eight binary digits is grouped by the computer into an eight-bit byte, and since the bits are generated at random, so the eight-bit bytes appear as random, with values between 0 and 255.

So you see in the file a perfectly created random collection of characters.

Not gibberish, but sane logical data.

P.S. Contemplate having a 404 mega-byte text file like this in almost every one of the trillions of cells in your aging body.

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