ELECTRONICS WEEKLY

An international workshop looking at the nature of information and how it is processed within cells and tissues was held at the University of Liverpool last week. According to Dr. Ray Paton, a computer scientist at Liverpool, the topic's importance lies in that it's difficult to understand biology without understanding information.

"Biology is rich in information models, computer science is relatively poor. This is a way of enriching computer science". As an example he cited work at Liverpool involving specifying enzymes as fuzzy systems. "Enzymes are powerful at pattern recognition and performing 'processing'. One person has done work on parasites using process algebra".

In Paton's view, there were several significant outcomes of the workshop. "The workshop brought together people from a multitude of disciplines that never normally meet". Another is the whole discussion about the nature of biological information. "No one knows what information is. For example when discussing chemicals in a cell, there is more to information than Shannon's description.

"The workshop was a test bed to see whether dialogue between groups would be generated. In this respect, groups from different disciplines found they had a common language".