Added this to my reading list:
On the salient limitations of the methods of assembly theory and their classification of molecular biosignatures
We demonstrate that the assembly pathway method underlying assembly theory (AT) is an encoding scheme widely used by popular statistical compression algorithms. We show that in all cases (synthetic or natural) AT performs similarly to other simple coding schemes and underperforms compared to system-related indexes based upon algorithmic probability that take into account statistical repetitions but also the likelihood of other computable patterns. Our results imply that the assembly index does not offer substantial improvements over existing methods, including traditional statistical ones, and imply that the separation between living and non-living compounds following these methods has been reported before.
From
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41540-024-00403-y"Assembly theory" has been receiving a lot of buzz lately as a method for detecting life in novel places. I first encountered assembly theory two years ago and from the beginning had the impression the authors were overclaiming (smelled hype-y to me), but so far I haven't sat down to sort out why I had that impression. I've seen some critical commentary about it (e.g.,
https://hectorzenil.medium.com/the-8-fallacies-of-assembly-theory-ba54428b0b45 ), but assessing all the arguments and counterarguments is a lot of work. I'm hoping this paper will help since the claims regarding AT's equivalence to certain compression algorithms is pretty straightforward to assess.
Oh, I just noticed the last author of the Nature article is the person who wrote the Medium article.
#AssemblyTheory #ExoBiology #ArtificialLife
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