Study Shows Why Life Outperforms Computers

In a new series of experiments, researchers determined that if life were structured like a computer, then it would have an incredibly high chance of spontaneously dying. The experts demonstrated that the operating systems (OS) driving modern-day computers are a lot less qualified at ensuring their survival than the guidelines and capabilities that living organisms have. In other words, life is a lot more adapted to living than non-biological systems. The study, which compares the OS of bacteria and computers, yields the first clues as to why this is happening, LiveScience reports.

“People often compare the genome of a living being to an operating system, [and] the analogy is quite correct. I think [the concept] is good for building larger software projects and speaks to how you get bigger pieces of code and stuff to work together,” explains Yale University molecular biophysics and computer sciences professor Mark Gerstein. He is also the coauthor of a paper detailing the findings, which was published in the latest issue of the esteemed publications Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The “natural” OS is based on genes, the expert adds.

Millions of years of evolution have ensured that life develops a few traits to promote its survival in circumstances that would have otherwise extinguished it. Some of these characteristics include a great deal of flexibility, as well as a considerable amount of independence in the way its elements work together. There are also huge differences, the Yale team says, between the way our cells perform tasks, and the way lines of code do the same thing inside a highly-interconnected computer OS. The group believes that continuing such studies could result in experts being able to devise more advanced operating systems that would be better capable of dealing with glitches, and therefore survive for longer.

“A computer operating system is composed of lots of different routines that are called [upon], usually from some high-level control program, and a genome consists of lots of genes turned on and off in a similar fashion,” the expert adds. For this investigation, the researchers compared the genome of the common E. coli bacteria with the codes lines underlying the popular open-source OS Linux. The main difference between the two is their approach to completing tasks. The bacteria takes a pyramid-like, bottom-up approach, in which 90 percent of its genes control the development of workers (proteins), and the other 10 percent the development of higher functions.

In the case of Linux, more than 80 percent of code lines deal with creating the “managers” or “bosses,” while only the remaining 20 percent actually contribute to the actual work. This is called a top-down approach, and researchers say that it is one of the main reasons why the artificial OS fails in a competition with very simple bacteria. “The way a computer is organized, the hierarchy is different. There are more things at the top and fewer things at the bottom, and the things that are highly connected are the workhorses. […] in a biological setting, only a few things are connected to many other things,” Gerstein concludes.