What exactly makes something “alive”? This ambitious paper tries to answer that eternal question by bringing the precision of math into biology’s messy world. Drawing inspiration from computer science concepts like data compression and randomness, Chaitin cooks up formulas to measure the “organized complexity” of simple shapes. The goal is to lay the groundwork for mathematically probing the origins of life itself, perhaps even tracing how order emerges from primordial chaos. It’s a first step towards digitizing the mysteries of evolution.
