Wolfram: Bioinformatics has traditionally concentrated on handling genomic data---mostly in the form of strings. What's now starting in computational biology is the study of actual processes that operate in biological systems. The things I've discovered in writing A New Kind of Science suggest a framework for thinking about such processes. The key idea is to think in terms of simple programs---and to use those to capture the essential mechanisms in biological systems. From genomics we know the lowest level code for biological organisms; now we have to have models for how that code actually runs.
