[Pipet Devel] Complexity

[Jennifer Steinbachs]

Quoting "J.W. Bizzaro" <bizzaro at geoserve.net>:

> jarl van katwijk wrote:
> >
> > You'd agree when I say Bioinformatics is the biology
term of what is more
> generally called Complexity?
>
> Hmmm.  That's a new one to me.  Are you talking about
complexity in math or
> comp sci or what?

Aren't they more or less the same?

For what it is worth, I'm sitting in a class (call it
"guest student") on bioinformatics offered through comp
sci at U of Chicago.  It has been quite amusing so
far...  Ever listen to computer scientists try to teach
other computer scientists about protein transcription
and translation?  :)  This course is more focused on
teaching algorithms for different aspects in
bioinformatics (mostly sequence analysis), so I also
keep hearing the phrase "well, it's actually messier
than that..."  I think the plan was originally to stay
focused on deterministic solutions, until I spoke up and
pointed out that probabilistic methods are making great
in-roads (HMMs, Bayesian estimation, etc.), and so this
week included a real hand-wavy lecture about Markov
chains and HMMs: "You use a subset of the data to make
your probability estimates from which you build your
model and then extrapolate to larger datasets."  Quite
an original explanation.

Cheers,
-j


------------------------
J. Steinbachs, PhD
Computational Biologist
Dept Botany
The Field Museum
Chicago, IL 60605-2496

312-665-7810
312-665-7158 (fax)
http://cb.fmnh.org
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