The Translator

The process of translating the genome into executable instructions is illustrated in Figure 4.2. As the read head moves along the genome, it passes the string of bits that it reads to the Translator. The Translator has a table that maps bit strings to instructions in the programming language of the cells. As soon as the incoming string of bits matches an entry in this table, the Translator executes the associated instruction and the read head is moved along the genome to the next unread bit. In the current implementation, the map of bit strings to instructions is hard-coded into the Translator, all instructions are encoded by bit strings of equal length (six bits), and all 64 possible six-bit codes have an entry in the table (which means that in some cases, two different six-bit codes encode the same instruction). Any binary string of length six is therefore guaranteed to decode to a valid instruction. This hard-coded mapping is defined in the system input file genetic_code.ini, described in Section A.5.1.

  

Figure 4.2: Translation of the Genome.

In future experiments with the system, the hard-coded mapping from bit strings to program instructions may be replaced by a mapping which can vary from one cell to the next, and which can evolve.