Harvard Theory of Computation Seminar

Biology As Computation

Leslie Valiant, Harvard University

Place and Time: Monday, October 16, Maxwell Dworkin 319 Refreshments at 2:30pm, talk at 2:45pm

ABSTRACT

We argue that computational models have an essential role in uncovering the principles behind a variety of biological phenomena. In particular we consider recent results relating to the following three questions: How can brains, given their known resource constraints such as the sparsity of connections and slow elements, do any significant information processing at all? How can evolution, in only a few billion years, evolve such complex mechanisms as it has? How can cognitive systems manipulate large amounts of such uncertain knowledge and get usefully reliable results? We show that each of these problems can be formulated as a quantitative question for a computational model, and argue that solutions to these formulations provide some understanding of these biological phenomena.