It's definitely not just you. To me, almost the entire list reads like "Figure out something how to do something frigging awesome in field X, by solving Y!" where X is any old scientific field and Y a random mathematical problem drawn from a pop math book with a picture to equation ratio greater than 1.
Mathematical Challenge 15: The Geometry of Genome Space
What notion of distance is needed to incorporate biological utility?
That was the point where I decided that I want to crawl into a hole and die [1]. The biology related "challenges" on this list drive me particularly crazy, though most of the others are pretty bad, too, since they're not well defined enough to even have much to say about.
[1] It's not that I don't think "notions of distance" are an important thing to understand, or anything like that, they certainly are, and biologists do worry about that type of stuff - I'd guess that the computational bio folks out there understand that stuff a lot better than a lot of mathematicians. But this question...it's the type of thing a philosophy major would ask after hearing about the concept of a metric space, getting stoned, and seeing a Darwin poster, not something anyone that actually knows both math and biology would (should?) ever ask.
It is phrased very poorly, and admittedly does sound pretty crazy, but it made sense to me as someone who works in the field. Gene regulation is a really complicated process, and its becoming increasingly clear that 3D interactions and chromatin remolding/confirmation are very important. Some regulatory elements act very specifically on genes that are over 1 million base pairs away. How are they targeted? Good question.
Although I suppose the probability that DARPA was thinking about gene regulation when they wrote this is slim to none :/
Mathematical Challenge 15: The Geometry of Genome Space
What notion of distance is needed to incorporate biological utility?
That was the point where I decided that I want to crawl into a hole and die [1]. The biology related "challenges" on this list drive me particularly crazy, though most of the others are pretty bad, too, since they're not well defined enough to even have much to say about.
[1] It's not that I don't think "notions of distance" are an important thing to understand, or anything like that, they certainly are, and biologists do worry about that type of stuff - I'd guess that the computational bio folks out there understand that stuff a lot better than a lot of mathematicians. But this question...it's the type of thing a philosophy major would ask after hearing about the concept of a metric space, getting stoned, and seeing a Darwin poster, not something anyone that actually knows both math and biology would (should?) ever ask.