Markus Covert and Mycoplasma

Mike's Notes

This is part of why I rebuilt Pipi 6 from memory.

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  • Fundamentals of Systems Biology

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Last Updated

11/05/2025

Markus Covert and Mycoplasma

By: Mike Peters
On a Sandy Beach: 10/03/2022

Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.

In 2014, I read an article in Scientific American by Markus Covert at Stanford about the successful computer cellular simulation of Mycoplasma. It was a fascinating article that made me think about Pipi and whether it could have been better built during 2005-2008.

When my wife and I left Christchurch in 2014 to start a new life, I became curious about modern cloud computing and read a great deal. Then, I realised that PIPI was a very early form of cloud computing, and many of its features were 10 years ahead of their time. What a waste!

By 2016, I was mad about missing the opportunity and decided to rebuild Pipi as a core platform from memory.

From 2017 to 2019, Pipi 6 was built by fusing the rebuilt core platform with Covert Lab's open-source cellular simulation software. This process was challenging and resulted in an unusual architecture. Every process was given a random probability, with many positive and negative feedback loops. It was like composing music. (In hindsight, synesthesia helped a lot.)

From Wikipedia

Markus W. Covert (born April 24, 1973) 

is a researcher and professor of bioengineering at Stanford University who led the simulation of the first organism in software.[1][2][3] Covert leads an interdisciplinary lab of approximately 10 graduate students and post-doctoral scholars.[4]



From Covert Lab

2 comments:

  1. It may be interesting to look at Markus recent talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQCa08U2Ykk

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Alex, I added the video recording of the talk to this post

    ReplyDelete