Table of Algorithmic Life

A single reference table mapping the same cognitive/control architecture onto three organisms spanning the full range of biological complexity.

This is a short working paper — essentially one landscape-format table with no accompanying prose. The summary is proportionally brief.

The core idea is that you can take a fixed vocabulary of "algorithmic life" components — sensors, effectors, a comparator, a model, an updater, an objective function, a planner, and an information boundary — and find concrete molecular instantiations of each slot in organisms as different as a virus, a bacterium, and a four-celled alga. The framework being applied is called the KT module mapping, though the source does not make the origin of that acronym explicit.

The three columns are bacteriophage λ, E. coli, and Tetrabaena socialis. At the virus end, "sensing" is receptor binding to a host surface protein, the "comparator" is the CI/Cro/CII gene-regulatory network deciding between lysis and lysogeny, and there is no explicit planner — the decision simply falls out of molecular dynamics. At the bacterial end, cooperative chemoreceptor clusters sense chemical gradients, CheA/CheY phosphorylation encodes the error signal, and methylation by CheR/CheB continuously re-tunes the system's baseline — a clean implementation of robust adaptation. At the multicellular end, the alga's eyespot is present but weak; instead, chloroplast pH and redox state serve as the primary sensor, and the system is biased toward preemptive photoprotection rather than active steering.

What makes the table interesting is the "information blanket" row, which asks: what physically delimits the individual? For the free phage it's the capsid and tail; for E. coli it's the cell envelope; for Tetrabaena it's the extracellular matrix plus intercellular bridges that couple four cells into one physiological unit. That row quietly does philosophical work — it operationalizes individuality in terms of the boundary separating internal model from external world.

The paper is a reference artifact, not an argument. It does not defend the framework or analyze tradeoffs between columns. Its value is as a lookup table: if you accept the KT vocabulary, here is what each term cashes out to across a three-order-of-magnitude span of biological organization.