I would say you are wrong. Heck, I do research on an extremely advanced form of universal computer that has less than 5 instructions in total. But you don't have to take my word for it. Here is a link to a website that describes the entire instruction set of a couple universal computer languages that prove my point. Google is your friend, you should use it more.
http://ling.ucsd.edu/~barker/Iota/
Tell me how you pre-scribe all that from the first bacteria to those two animals with all the intervening species in between with two lines of code.
A computer that only has two instructions is still allowed to process an arbitrarily large amount of information. Just because the control function of the computer is extremely tiny does not mean that you can't build incredibly large and expressive systems. I think you misunderstood what having a small instruction set means. You can have a machine that only knows two instructions and STILL have millions of lines of code. Remember, there is no real difference between a program and data anyway.
Turing machines have a halting problem, living things do not
From this statement, I'm not sure that you actually grok the Halting Problem. I would also state as a relevant point that there exists novel Turing Machine (i.e. universal computer) models that effectively "cheat" the halting problem by tweaking some of the underlying assumptions of Turing machines. We've had such machines running on silicon for a few years now.
I think you have been missing the point of my postings. I am quite aware that the number of 'instructions' in a computer is of little relevance to what it can do. A greater number of instructions just makes programs run faster and makes programming easier.
A computer that only has two instructions is still allowed to process an arbitrarily large amount of information. Just because the control function of the computer is extremely tiny does not mean that you can't build incredibly large and expressive systems. I think you misunderstood what having a small instruction set means.
No I did not, in fact you are practically repeating what I said in the post you are responding to (#486) while claiming I do not understand the question. I do understand the problem quite well. The problem is not how many instructions there are in a process but how much code is needed to accomplish a task. By the term 'code' I mean either code within the computer or within the program since as we both agree they are interchangeable to a great extent.
My point has been all along that you need a lot more than just a few lines of code to accomplish the task of specifying the vast variety of life we see. You need a lot more than the 5-6 rules which Wolfram claims is all that is necessary to pre-scribe the complexity of living things (and which started our discussion).
Turing machines have a halting problem, living things do not. -me-
From this statement, I'm not sure that you actually grok the Halting Problem. I would also state as a relevant point that there exists novel Turing Machine (i.e. universal computer) models that effectively "cheat" the halting problem
I do understand it. I understand that a Turing machine does not understand what a human immediately perceives. Yes, you can 'cheat' to stop the halting problem, but then that is not what I was talking about is it? It is no longer a classical turing machine. You have been forced to intelligently design a way around the problem.