Slashdot Mirror
Self-Assembling Nanocomputers
A Semi-Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article a researcher at Harvard University has developed techniques for self assembly of nanoscale wires that operate without resistance due to a property called ballistic conductivity. He hopes the research will provide an 'end run' around convential top-down circuit designs, allowing much smaller, faster and more energy efficient computers."
So this sort of thing could easily mean that we could have tiny computers that run for a long time on a single battery and are ninety billion times better than anything we currently have, right?
I just came.
Username taken, please choose another one.
Apparently this TrollScript seems to work about as well as any other Open Source project: Not at all. I bet if Microsoft had made this it would work flawlessly, much like the amazing new Windows XP. I wiped off the shitty Mandrake 8.1 from my two 486s and put XP on them. Not only do they run faster than they did when Linux clogged them up, they're also much more stable. Its a shame that Linux can't work with only 8 megs of RAM, as XP can. Perhaps some day.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
While at first glance, your theory would hold true. But taking a second glance we see that the only way this could work would be with nuclear power. I for one cannot stand idly by while my country walks further down the road towards nuclear holocaust. While proponents of nuclear power claim its safe, we all know that one jammed cog and a nuclear powerplant, even the supposedly safer "pebble"-based plants, will explode in a gigantic mushroom cloud of death. Please do not support this technology, as it is just one more nail in the atomic coffin.
Thank you.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
But since this is a Harvard researcher being written up in the Harvard press, my hype-o-meter is on the alert. Then I read this:
Lieber has "philosophical differences" with the industry's "top-down" approach to nanotechnology--taking big things and making them smaller. "The way to truly revolutionize the future," he says, "is to take a completely different approach: build things from the bottom up."
Pardon me, but have these philosophical differences yielded even a working flip-flop yet? The world is littered with "proofs of concept" that are too difficult to implement. I'll admit that this technology is extremely promising, but at this highly experimental stage of development it's hardly time to go bashing the accomplishments of the semiconductor industry. Unless, of course, you're trying to drum up press for yourself.
That said, sounds pretty cool. I'll be even more interested when they can form some basic logic circuits with it.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
I think I'm going to need a new job, sell my house, sell my stereo... Once anybody in the commercial world gets a hold of this, you know no-one will be able to afford it.
-mrbkap
After a while they will just self-assemble into a quake-IV-playing machine, but without having to worry about any sort of lame CRT-based frame-displaying device. Then you will never be able to make them do any sort of useful work.
All that technological progress... just for the ultimate game of quake. Hmm... sounds like a day at work...
(well, if I had work, that is. I think it would get in the way of playing quake, though...)
certron
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
With a statement like that, I bet half of the Army's decision-makers are already lining up to fund these guys.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Since there's no resistivity, that means that calculations will be almost instantaneous, right? And it will have very low power consumption, no waste heat, and be incredibly small?
So this sort of thing could easily mean that we could have tiny computers that run for a long time on a single battery and are ninety billion times better than anything we currently have, right?
Sounds like magic to me. If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
[sarcasm] ;-)
If it just assembled itself into a beowulf cluster of multiple instances of itself
[/sarcasm]
Yes, that WAS lame...
"In 10 or 20 years there might be no more need for hard disks, because solid-state memory could store so much data."
5 Terabyte, solid state hard drive: 150 USD.
No more need to de-frag, the memory could dynamically reallocate the clusters, etc. This would probably revolutionize everything we've ever thought about traditional filesystems.
"Superposition theoretically allows quantum computers to solve complex algorithms (such as those used in cryptography) that would be impossible for a conventional computer to tackle."
Will any of our data truly be safe? Who's going to get these computers first? Big Brother. Would even a 512K or 1Mb encryption key be big enough? A 1Mb key would be feasible for a 20K message with optical net connections, but would it do us any good? Is the solution also going to be a quantum-type algorithm?
"An undergraduate student of his is taking this idea even further, and working to create a biological computing interface."
Wearable? IMPLANTABLES? Was William Gibson right all along? Will a tradional UI even be neccessary when we can all interface at the speed of thought? Might a standardized thought-interface be a way to diagnose mental illness? Might it be the cure?
Pandora's box is opening, slowly and surely before us.
----- "Oh, Stewardess! I speak l33t!"
ok, whether or not thats bashing a slashdot editor, whether or not its by a troll poster, you have to admit that was fucking funny
OK, so you have proof of concept for conductors, just like a molecule with a spinning radical is "a nano-motor". Now go ahead and apply it. And get it to withstand more than 10 minutes of background cosmic rays. Even current chip technology is coming up against problems with that one!
It all sounds like an buzz-worded funding magnet article to me.
"Targets so small you need to go back in time just to remember where you left them."
:)
Traditional 'Ballistics' are not applicable to nanoscapes...the typical physics involved with 'ballistics', such as drag, inertia, gravity, etc. are replaced at the nano-level by such things as light, vibration, EMI, temperature, viscosity, reflectivity and any number of items found in the sub-atomic spectrum.
A term such as 'nano-ballistics' would at least be a step in the right direction.
The term 'ballistics' is mis-used in this case, where the minimum inference is that they are self-assembling due to an entirely different set of processes...thus the need for an entirely different set of references. Work on it, please...we'll come back later to see if you've pulled your head outurerast
I'd just like to know, am I the only one afraid of nanoids entering my body and building things inside me?
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Has someone finally designed a working Von Neumann machine?
Ceci n'est pas un post
Great, negligible resistance means nearly no heat, which means godawful small transistor sizes and separations. Cool! Nanotechnology is showing it's potential.
Thanks,
Travis
forkspoon@hotmail.com
With reproduction added to the mix, it can be argued that 3 of 4 of these benchmarks are covered. Whose to say that the fourth, evolution, wouldn't follow naturally?
ps: Once these nano-machines develop opposable thumbs, I think we could be in trouble.
ummm...that's all.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
About half way through the article:
"Another set of wires can be laid perpendicular to the first simply by rotating the apparatus 90 degrees. Already, his lab has produced a transistor just 10 atoms across."
I don't really see how a technique like this is anywhere near being able to produce anything near the complexity of a computer. The way this fluff article talks about it, you think Harvard would be going into production next year.
Don't waste your time on this one folks. It's just self-reinforcing PR for Harvard. They've also managed to get almost every theoretical computing buzzword in: quantum computing, biological computing interface, superposition, ballistic conductivity, transistor (:P), etc etc.
I'll be interested when this becomes more realistic.
I'd swear this guy was working for (in the cult of) Microsoft, except that if he was, he should be pushing XP and not Win2k. Also, he wouldn't have mentioned the licence restrictions...
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
Most MS trolls (Microsoft employees assigned to participate in public forums, pretending to be industry experts...sic), usually are...this is part of their 'profile', and one of the ways they attempt to endear themselves to neophytes....notice how the writing invites paraphrasing. Any number of rookies will take this trash as gospel, and regurgitate it around the water cooler for the next 6 months.
:)
All part of the big lie out of redmund...it will be while before it fades back into the darkness from whence it came.
Nice to know they are still afraid, however
... always make me think something like, "Go, Homo sapiens, go."
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
It's a poor man that blames his tools...
Actually, I just wanted to throw that quote out. This guy is obviously a Microsoft troll, with a gluegun for brains. He claims to understand not only programming kernels, but the needs of the corporate world, academia and what we all know...sounds just like the marketing team he represents. He's not even original enough to make me angry.
Full of shit
Off-topic
And the most scaring, rated "insightful"
do they pull apart big lego structures? :)
Nevrar
Already, his lab has produced a transistor just 10 atoms across.
Do you read the articles, or do you just bitch?
Daniel
The Israelis came up with a dna-based nanowire a couple years back. There's some talk on nanotech mailing lists about using ribosomes (the things inside cells that assemble proteins from instructions encoded in RNA) as organic nano-assemlers. Theroretically (once someone figured out how to code RNA to produce the right molecules), the ribosomes could be used as self-assemblers to churn out miles of organic nanowire. You could even code robosomes to assemble other ribosomes, thus exponentially increasing output. The only costly part would be the (gold) electrodes.
VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming
Uh. Do you wanna explain that. Do mean you were doing a peek and poke.
There's certainly a lot to be said for the 'bottom-up' approach to nanotechnology. Cost for starters! One issue though is, how does one address these very tiny devices?
The problem with a whole bunch of identical tiny circuits is of course that they're all identical - there's no way to differentiate between them. There will have to be some way of distinguishing and interacting with these units.
A couple of ideas spring to mind though. One is to encode the position of one of these units in the unit itself as it is being assembled, by interacting with some sort of precisely engineered field. What would work (if anything) depends very much on the chemistry, but it could be something as simple as a gradient in an electrostatic field, to aligning with a very fine grid of polarized light. There are options, but it all sounds Hard. Schemes like this could attack the problem of differentiation, but there's still interaction and addressing.
One way to solve the addressing problem is to bypass it almost entirely. If these structures are sufficiently small, and can be engineered to act as a giant grid of finite-state automata with evolution rules based on neighbouring states, one can simulate a computational device with a version of Conway's Life on speed. Input and output can be done at the edges of the constructed array, which is probably going to be more simple than trying to address the middle of the structure. The problem lies in initialising the state of the array - clearing it is probably easy enough, depending on how state is stored, but priming it with a state that admits the computational task desired seems to be almost as hard as addressing the cells in the first place.
Another approach might be to give each cell some random state as it is constructed (and there should be plenty of sources of randomness at the molecular level to draw on.) Imagine that this state corresponds to an "activation key": when an appropriately modulated high frequency EM signal hits the cell, it pushes it over into an active state. Before this, it's effectively off (perhaps an off cell would simply propogate signals from its neighbours and do no computation). Give each cell some way of indicating that it has been activated (eg, it emits some light upon activation), and then fire random keys at the cells. This solves the addressing problem, and the interaction problem (one could use the same key for changing the cell's state) - but then one has no easy way of telling how the newly identified cell connects to the other addressable cells.
Do any slashdotters have any ideas? Or can point to literature where these problems are (ahem) addressed?
Well, aside from the obvious environmental and geo-political implications of self-replicating machines - there is another important aspect to such machines. Copywrite enforcement.
Just as magical as it would be to make a stable batch of these machines which would reliably work (even in laboratory conditions) - the thought of how these things would possibly be kept from being altered or copied ad infinitum is equal in terms of seeming implausibility.
What methods might work?
Making the constuction materials be of some "special" molecules? Not likely to keep people from making unauthorized copies before too long, plus it makes engineering potentially more difficult.
Adding extra logic to each one to ensure legality? Aside from again the engineering aspects, it is hard to even brainstorm minimally plausible ideas.
Harsh legal enforcement? The sheer convenience of these micromachines would ensure demand is high enough to bypass any law short of complete totalitarianism based on the product. This would be more than yesterday's computer, internet, or cell phone demand - once applications development hit mainstream programming, and then mainstream consciousness, the demand would be levels of magnitude higher than anything we've seen.
The only reliable way I could think to make these machines properly profitable would be to use societal paranoia and fear to convince everyone that these machines are dangerous, and only sell them to 'licensed technicians for clean-room-only use'. But this protection of profitability would only last so long before demand creeped back up, or some major catastrophy renewed the fear factor.
Everything about this sounds like it might make a good story though.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
...this is part of their 'profile', and one of the ways they attempt to endear themselves to neophytes...
No, no, it's a fucking TROLL!! He's not trying to endear himself to anyone. He's just trying to get bites, and you just gave him one.
It's total bullshit, he's trying to get responses, he doesn't give a rat's ass either way.
And the person you replied to even spelled it out for you and you still didn't get it!
Now, that's fucking rich!
wow, you're smart and important! It's a good thing that there are sharp folks like yourself keeping watch!
Robots that can assemble themselves sound great and all...
but can they disassemble themselves and put their parts into the correct bin before its time for bed?
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Quite frankly, electronic equipment that can re-arrange itself without any outside help scares me.
Nanobots set up for desctuction and stick a couple of millions of those into the water supply, there goes the people.... Don't you guys think nanobots could be used as an efficient weapon?
kawai
...be afraid...be very afraid.
Resistance, being futile, is not responsible for the light-speed limit for electron flow. That's Einstein's fault. However, if the circuit is considerably smaller than current designs, then all the electrical pathways get drastically shortened and processing gets faster anyway...
Excuse me, I just had an image of a 55-gallon drum of these things sitting by my computer, quietly self-replicating into a Beowulf cluster of a billion-odd submicroscopic quantum computers. It could solve every computational problem currently on the books in the blink of an aibo, render all cryptography (except OTP) useless, and probably faithfully emulate the intelligence of several myriad Ph.D.'s long enough to invent a higher consciousness for itself, becoming an unimaginably transcendent cerebral being to which humans would seem as advanced as bacteria.
And think of the Quake framerates!
Since you're painfully obviously new here, I'll let you in on something. That guy posts the same troll at least once every few days, sometimes more than once a day. And after all this time he still gets bites with it.
You got trolled bad, but not as bad as some newbies do.
Hey man, long time no see, BSD troll!
Good to see you again!
Optical based circuts
are practical,afordable, and constructable with current technology.
Best of all rudimentry optical circuts have
been used for some computing components such as
the orange macro powerbook excelerator
HUGE number decompilers etc.
On top of all this the could use 90% of the light spectrum thus allowing for at circtus aproaching the speed of light PER a spectrum.
No need for nanites other than style points then.
Amazing, a person that does VB for 8 years and thinks he is a kernel hacker, and refers to linux as "the" linux. Some consultant. I'm sure you may have written a few VB scripts to reboot those win2k boxen every day. Meanwhile I have had a webserver that served 1Gb/3days up for over 200+ days (hardware upgrades are a bitch). Smells like someone is spilling some FUD.
gj, egg troll! I can't believe that cut and pasting still works for ya! 7 replies, and all of them are taking karma hits! It's beautiful! I've tried cut and pasting a little myself, back in the day, but (though I got ph4t karma for it) I never got responses like this :(
True, true. You've foiled us this time, but we will come back with reinforcements!
I don't ever want to hear the word "CmdrTaco" and "it's coming" in the same sentance
They were in 2 different sentences, though.
T-1000 here we come!
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Every hardware-scale-advance news article will describe Moores first law.
Ahh, my favourite rhetorical recipe, the tautological soffle.
.. these can make 7of9 :)
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
This article somehow makes me think of the Borg in the Star Trek series. The Borg apparently use some sort of self-replicating nanobots/nanocircetry to controll their drone systems.
... okay. No more Trek. :)
I remember that in one Voyager episode, the Ferengi attempted to lure Voyager into som sort of wormhole in order to kill the crew, and get hold of 7of9's Borg Nanobots, since they where extremely valuable.
The guy has created wires... even if you probably cannot think of building any sort of circuit without wires, I'd say it's hardly the most critical component. And he does not say how he's going to connect his wires to something useful! Still a long way to go! He does not seem to be doing much more than the dreamers at
this place (Self assembled DNA computer?)
ONE transistor!
btw. where is the self-assembling? making some nanowires align all in the same direction is already self-assembling ? ROTFL!
Now that we can build each other, it will never end...
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Wouldn't having indentical reproducing robots be a violation of the DMCA. Wouldn't one copywrighted robot be plenty?
</sarcasm>
Wheres FMD? Its been completely finished for 3 years now, and no manufacture is touching it because they all want to support DVD, and support technologies approved by the movie and record companies. Technology which is too powerful to control, is surpressed for as long as possible until some small company begins selling a product based on it, THEN big companies jump into the picture because they have no choice.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
SKYNET is pleased, those involved
will receive double protein
ration.
Yours truly
SKYNET
COLOSSUS, the true dominator of
mankind, is pleased. Those involved
will receive a triple protein
ration.
yours in colossus,
colossus
These thing could be graet for storage, IF you run out just tell them to grow some more and use them to store your data, the only problem would be security :)
--
The computer told me to press any key to continue,I pressed the one looking like this (|) !!OH SH*T!!
"What brings about new species to replace the extinct ones?..." - someguy
Self assembly is how the body builds a lot of its internal structures. I did a bunch of work on this in my doctorate - basically you can get some reasonably complex structures (e.g. a virus shell) from a small set of repeating sub-units.
One of the common structures found in all cells are 'micro-tubules' - long cylinders made of repeating tiles of a protein called, imaginatively, 'tubulin'. They look a bit like a coil of rope; technically it's most common form is a '4-start, 13 unit helix'.
Now the place these protein structures are found *most* commonly is in neurons, which are crammed to the gills with these things. And there is a (way-out, whacky, widely discredited, completely batshit, but still very cool) theory that the way our brains actually work is not just at the synapse level, but at the sub-cell level using these microtubules. (This would add maybe another 5 orders of magnitude to the available computing power of the brain if it were true; these suckers are small and there's *heaps* of 'em!).
The idea (and it keeps cropping up in papers 'cause it's just so appealing :-) ) is that
computations can be done using a 'game of life'
like system of electical charges on the outside
of the microtubule, where each unit adops an
electric polarity, and then 'flips' it's
neighbours depending on a simple set of rules.
It's a very cute idea, completely lacking in
anything so crass as experimental evidence.
These days of course no one believes a word of it.
<false modesty>For some dodgy work on nanoscale self-assembly, and for some half decent pictures of microtubules, check out my thesis at nanoscale simulation </false modesty>
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.
if we could get nanotech to build itself, sure the commercial industry would love it, untill one person got greedy and sold out the company, then gives it to family, friends, etc. then others get it. more control to the individual (unfortunatly it also means AOLers, and joe sixpack can do things he didn't think up before)
Self-assembly is very cool. Unfortunately this isn't an example.
He mixes the components together but then pours them onto a matrix. Then he mixes the next one and pours that on the previous one. So still cool, but not "self-assembling"
Self-assembling structures like proteins and DNA do exist, and are more useful. DNA is an example of a structure which includes positional info (i.e. addressing) which an earlier poster indicated would be important.
Likely a cell is a good example of an ideal machine. It's very complex, but it includes power source, self-maintenance and assembly. These little parts he's building (they're not even "machines" yet) don't address these issues.