DNA is Turing complete

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Via Hacker News I found out about Rule 110, which is apparently the simplest known system that is Turing complete (capable of any calculation).

Rule 110, like the Game of Life, exhibits what Wolfram calls “Class 4 behavior,” which is neither completely stable nor completely chaotic. Localized structures appear and interact in various complicated-looking ways.

While working on the development of NKS, Wolfram’s research assistant Matthew Cook proved Rule 110 capable of supporting universal computation. Rule 110 is a simple enough system to suggest that naturally occurring physical systems may also be capable of universality— meaning that many of their properties will be undecidable, and not amenable to closed-form mathematical solutions.

Looking at the patterns generated by Rule 110, I thought about early life forms, and I thought about the tough question of how did early strings of RNA start to coalesce into organisms? This lead me to wonder if DNA was Turing complete, and apparently it is. I found this reference on Reddit On The Computational Power Of Insertion-Deletion Systems.