A Primer On DNA Computing And Software Breeding

There's been some interesting article published lately in the realm of DNA computing and software breeding models - kinda the land where 1s and 0s and Darwin meet. ArtsTechnica has got a primer on DNA computing which goes over the high points of DNA computing, and is accessible to anyone who remembers high school bio. Feed Magazine has got an article that examines breeding software and what that means.

Comments

Re:Why all the fuss over "biological" computing?

[Nagash]

There's more to it than doing actual computation. These are arguments that have been had a thousand times over in the past: "I don't see the benefit right now, so what's the point?" It may be excessively useful, it may not. The point is, we have to find out.

Even if DNA computing proves to be too cumbersome to implement, we can still gain lots from it - for example, perhaps hidden deep within it is another model of computation. Maybe we can find something that's better then a Turing machine (i.e., it can check another program for infinite loops and find them). Hell, it may prove to be a useful storage device.

DNA does operations on data. It does remarkable things with them and it can do a lot of things at once. Studying this is not a bad idea, but so is putting all or eggs in one basket. If totally concentrated on shrinking die/chip sizes, we'll probably regret it at some point. Push the limits. It's fun! :)

Woz