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."
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The 3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour, we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.
thank you.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
self-assembled from 10 gallons of spooge.
To fix Taco's nano dick!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
This FP is brought to you by TrollScript, the next generation in Slashdot trolling technology.
I want to commend you on doing an excellent job of keeping the coveted "Second Post" away from the gay clutches of the Anonymous Coward. There's nothing more an AC likes than to get his semen-stained hands onto the 2nd post. He can then use it to further his villanous homosexual agenda, and coax young, confused Slashbots into his leather-bound den, and engage them in the unspeakable vice of the Greeks. Makes me sick.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
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.
Yet another crppling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confrmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in th recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survval prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Sometime this week a new troll about CmdrTaco's life will appear. As with all my other trolls about him, it is completely and utterly true. Like me I am sure you will be disgusted with CmdrTaco's behavior.
I just thought I should let you all know that it's coming.
Digital Divide? The only divide Linux can bridge is the crack of my ass, when I use it to wipe my ass clean.
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 don't ever want to hear the word "CmdrTaco" and "it's coming" in the same sentance. My wang just squirmed back inside my body.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
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!"
Sorry about that egg troll. I will avoid that next time.
Digital Divide? The only divide Linux can bridge is the crack of my ass, when I use it to wipe my ass clean.
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
Thats one FUCKING funny troll.
I think he meant to say GHAY.
The real thing. Accept no substitute!
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.
I had to remove mandrake couple of weeks ago because i couldn't stand the bloated-as-hell-KDE-desktop. Installing xfce didn't help much. It did run a little bit faster, but still a lot slower compared to my 98 box. One thing that is interesting to note is that it crashed more than my win 98. To be honest, it's kinda disappointing. I was hoping that installing linux would give me a lot more stable OS. But having the system crash 5 minutes after the installation, I would have to say that Linux's stability is just a myth. Don't even get me started on the hardware support, security, etc.
I admit that it would be nice to have a free OS, but not a shitty free OS. So folks, get real. The whole open source thing is just a bull shit, and definitely a complete waste of time.
sincerely,
Trollcaholic
Does this mean we won't need niggers to till our fields for us anymore?
Can we get these nano thingamajiggers to take their place?
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.
... 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.