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This study presents evidence that executable computer programs and human genomes contain similar patterns of repetitive code. When viewed with sequence visualization tools, these similarities are both striking and pervasive. The primary similarities are listed in order of scale: (1) homopolymers, (2) tandem repeats, (3) distributed repeats, (4) isochores, (5) and entire chromosome/file organization. Most strikingly, data visualization reveals that executable codes regularly make extensive use of tandem repeats which exhibit similar visual patterns as seen in higher genomes. In biology these tandem repeat patterns are normally attributed to replication errors, insertions, deletions, and substitutions. Similarly, on a larger scale, executable codes display regions with different ratios of 1's and 0's which parallel the isochore patterns within chromosomes, caused by local variation in the number of A/T vs. G/C. Further, blocks of data are stored at the beginning or end of a file, while the primary instructions occupy the middle of a file. This creates the same organizational patterns observed in human chromosome arms, where repetitive sequences are grouped near the telomeres and centromeres.

I propose that these similarities can be explained by universal constraints in efficient information encoding and execution. The genome may be viewed as the executable program that encodes life. Given the evidence that computer programs and genomes use many of the same patterns of organization, despite having very different context, it should be informative to explore the ways in which knowledge of computer architecture can be applied to biology and vice versa.