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Scientists build DNA based computer
Archangel Michael writes "Israeli scientists have built a DNA computer so tiny that a trillion of them could fit in a test tube and perform a billion operations per second with 99.8 percent accuracy.
Yahoo News has the story"
Are they sure that the calculation just isn't off by .2%?
99.8% accuracy is fine for a proof-of-concept demo, but as always, the devil is in the details. This won't be a useful technology until it can do a hell of a lot better than that. I certainly wouldn't trust my PC if it made mistakes on .2% of its calculations. Who knows, it might take several years to develop a really usable version of this, or it might never get into the market at all if, say, other technologies can beat it to market or have better cost/performance ratios.
I'll say how cool that is when they manage to put a trillion in a test tube and perform a billion calculations. This can be seriously cool, and I'll be there cheering when they have something a bit more impressive to show.
Man, a whole galaxy could have signed up for free AOL service with the DNA I just jetissoned...
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Does that mean that you're running the computation a bunch of times each second, and 99.8% of the 'output' molecules give the right answer? So you could never be 100% sure that you got the right answer?
i think i'll be modded -1 troll, just as you were ;)
I am no scientist... but a trillion of these can perform a billion operations? is this correct? can someone explain WHY it takes 1000 computers per operation?
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
DAMN IT!
Is your company running tools written by ma
If that is a billion operations per second for the whole tube of a trillion units, then is makes about 1000 seconds per unit - a system with oil lamps and old ladies could be faster, although it might not fit in a single tube....
Now I'll have to buy anti-biotics for my computer when it gets a virus! I wonder if it will be covered by an HMO?
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
2. Here's a link on how to run Linus on it
3. Knowing Microsoft they are going to try and control substrate or medium for the DNA proliferation inside.
Where do you plug everything in? or are we going to have to use microscopic keyboards and mice?
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
The USA has built one of these a long time ago, at least a few years now.
This isnt new.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
but the kids only have a 60% accuracy. My wife blames me...
:(
Hmm....how many operations per second would a decent game of quake take ?
The statement below is true.
The statement above is false.
Let me know when you have a use for 80 billion wrong answers. I have loads of them already without even having to calculate them!
Maybe we could have intelligent robots going around fix rougue cells. This is already a procedure for many diseases, but now the DNA injected could be 'smart' DNA and know exactly what to change and what not too.
We think we just calculated how to safely detonate this nuclear device, but we're not entirely sure we got it right. Darn these DNA computers! Darn them to heck!
Fast enough to run XP and crashing only 1% of the time is an improvement.
I worked as a lowly undergrad lab assistant during my university days. (Texas A&M). We ran several similar experiments, that dealt with analyzing how the nucleotides of common cleaning products could be utilized more efficiently when it came to cleaning up toxic spill sites. Not suprisingly, yeast (from beer) was a commonly proposed subject for "alternate" experimentation. Some of my colleagues were quite surprised at how effective certain combinations could be. None of them were as successful as this project though, from the sound of things.
Think about the viruses people will make for these once they are common... *shudder*
oh wait, I guess that's what I am.
Does anyone else have a problem with using the fundamental building block of life to power a computer? How will they know that the source code to WindowsGM isn't the same as, say, HIV?
I know it will probably all be in vitro, but what's going to protect me from getting infected with a stray snipped of 3D rotation code?
Eek! Gives a whole new meaning to "virus".
*meep*
Wow, does anyone else remember those from Masters Of Orion II research tree? They took forever to research, but they give your ships beam weapons +125% chance of hitting their targets! Man, now I have to crank MOO 2 up again for another go!
- kengineer
With the poll today being about RAM implants, I find this a really interesting story. Since people are usually wrong more than .2% of the time anyway, how long do you think it will be until this concept is used for implants?
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
And then alert a repair mechanism when errors are found. It would probably need to survey other cells to compare results.
Now we can assimilate people.
until they catch up to my brain's computing power. ;-)
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
The beer and bacteria article was the one previous. This one's about using snot in a test tube for a computer.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
Brings up the next question ... with a computer that tiny are you going to be required to use a magnifying glass in order to see the monitor ... and if you can use regular computer components ... will you have to have some kind of super small ps2 ports and what not? ...
Can you power these with bacteria? ...
hehehehee a square foot of these as a beowulf cluster ... and Does it run linux? :-)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
The smallpox virus, with only a few thousand base pairs of DNA, could wipe out nearly half the world's population, 2.5 billion people, if released. And that's a virus that doesn't even have intelligence!
Now we're talking about creating DNA-based computers. Has anyone even stopped to think about this? What happens if someone runs a neural network or similarly advanced artificial intelligence on one of these computers? What happens if one of them becomes even slightly self-aware?
That's right, an intelligent virus; a downright apocalypse. Armageddon. We'd just be food for the next life form.
Honestly, I think these "scientists" would create a bomb to destroy the Universe given the opportunity, just to see if they could do it. There's no reason to mess with the designs of our Creator like this. I'm not condemning all biosciences, just the projects that endanger all of Humanity- Viral Genetic Engineering, Human Cloning, and now Sentient Virii.
I don't even know why I read the news anymore.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
Very interesting that they have gotten to the point where they can cut portions of DNA and test them to identify which functions they can perform enough to make a rudimentary "computer".
Again, interesting - but one must wonder if this work is something inherently creative that should be protected by intellectual property laws, or if it is merely observing and splicing naturally occuring processes.
It may be a premature concern though - but ultimately, what difference is there other than scope in using DNA-oriented systems to create protein computers, and today's circuit-based fabrication technology? How long will the prior art of nature stand before companies will own DNA sequences?
Ryan Fenton
Computers keep getting smaller and smaller. In 1980 our IBM Series 1 4779 ($50,000 at the time), was the size of a refridgerator, and alot damn heavier. 21 years later our production servers are in mid-sized towers. In 1980, the thought of someone walking out of the building with our series 1 was just a laught. Today, its still questionable if someone could sneak a mid-sized case past security (Uh, yeah, I'm pregnant, and they think he'll have a square head).
I've heard about server cubes already that are even smaller. Add onto that rack mount servers. Things are just getting smaller, which means they are easier to get out the door.
What happens when my server farm is the size of a test tube? Unlclip the 20 pin cable the gives it power, connects it to the network, and runs the perifrials, and shove it in your pocket?
Still somewhat difficult with great security. But no security is 100.0000000% perfect (Unplugged, in a cement block, under 200 ft of sand at the bottom of the pacific?). The only thing I could think of was to put one of those magnetic strips on it that the music stores (that I dont go to anymore) use? Metal detectors at the doors? DNA detectors?
Anyways, any of you have any idea's for physical security when our servers start getting small enough to throw in a cigarette pack (a few years off)?
Can all fish swim?
Newly developed gas additive turns every car into "Herbie, The Love Bug" (Yes, I'm old. Get over it!) Also, new secret ingredient in JOLT(tm) really can make you smarter! (follow with: Me burping the theory of relativity.)
Now that means we'll soon have new life forms that can be banned as circumvention devices under the DMCA...
-- Shamus
Bleah!
from the article:
When a trillion computers run together they are capable of performing a billion operations
So, if does that mean that there are 1,000 tiny computers for each individual operation, or is some translator mixing up his numbers?
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
I don't know what to make out of this.
...
"Since we don't know how to effectively modify these machines or create new ones just yet, the trick is to find
naturally existing machines that, when combined, can be steered to actually compute," he added.
and
Israeli scientists have built a DNA computer so tiny that a trillion of them could fit in a test tube and perform a billion operations per second with 99.8 percent accuracy.
In other words: We got lucky and hope to find something in the nature that will do the research for us. Seriously, they've got a long way to go. I currently don't belive DNA computers is the future. Chemistry is much slower than physics. I would rather have put my money - and efford - on making quantum dot - or optical computers.
That's the future
Look a monkey!
If they make it even less accurate then there would be a higher probability that the instruction that causes Windows to BSOD would be executed incorrectly, thus rendering it more stable.
Since our mode of thinking in the U.S.A. is that any technology that comes along should be implemented no matter the consequences, I predict it won't be long before we are all required to have biocomputers implanted. Basis:
After all, if you have nothing to hide you have no reason to fear this technology, right?
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
"99.8 percent accuracy"
"Yikes, I've got the blue gunk of death!"
What they describe is a computer in that it can take input and process to produce output, but since both input and output are in chemical form, how useful can this practically be? I'm not sure I understand how useful it is to have a trillion computers that, when infused with the right chemical mixture, all compute exactly the same data and arrive (99% of the time) at the same result.
Honestly, how would you turn this into a practical computer? On the desktop? A supercomputer?
Well, if it's a reproducable system, then presumably, you wouldn't buy just ONE such server, but the RIGHTS to make and use a certain number of them. If someone stole your server box, you'd have to get another (presumably relatively cheap) replacement, dump in the fluid, connect to the most recent backup, and go.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
Unfortunately by analyzing all the dna contained in the test-tube the only answer the earth DNA computer ever gave was 41.496 or 98.8% of 42.
Palestinian scientists, not to be undone began an RNA computer which would give the question to the enigmatic answer of 42.
Unfortunately, the RNA computer was considered to be a circumvention of a DNA copyrighted device and the DNAMCA (DNA millenium copyright act) was invoked to assasinate the bioterroists and destroy their technology. to prevent unauthorized cracking of the DNA code
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
99.8% uptime? Now, even DNA is more reliable than Windows.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
> 99.8% accuracy is fine for a proof-of-concept demo
There are a host of applications where that kind of accuracy would be great. Think about 3D rendering for games. Do you care that an occational pixel is slightly off color if it means you can render the entire scene in MUCH greater detail? There are also many applications in things like simulation. Lastly, with calcuation power to burn you can always run a given calculation multiple times and then use standard statistical techniques to get arbitrary levels of certainly about the accuracy.
> Who knows, it might take several years
> to develop a really usable version of this
Of course it will. I don't think anyone claimed you'd see this replacing your Pentium. However, think big! Things like DNA computers and Qauntum computers will eventually make our current silicon chips look like toys.
Steve
No actual facts, no explanations, but lots of hyperboly and waxing poetic about how this will change the future of humanity.
"When it is all mixed together in the test tube, the software and hardware operate on the input molecule to create the output."
Oh, so that's how it works! I see. Btw, what exactly is the "software" and what is the "hardware"? So far they only mentioned DNA/RNA (it's "cousin" don't you know) and enzymes - did they just pick one to be the "software"?
I also enjoyed "genes stores data on four chemical bases -- known by the letters A, T, C and G -- giving it massive memory capability" - it's the four bases that give it the massive memory capability, not the fact that they are bloody tiny.
More of a quesiton here: "the simplest computing machines -- the automaton which can answer certain yes or no questions" - do they mean a finite automaton here, or what? DFA? NFA? PDA?
sic transit gloria mundi
"The microscopic computer's input, output and software are made up of DNA molecules -- which store and process encoded information in living organisms."
If this is the case, I'm pretty sure the Animal Rights activists would be all over this shit half a minute.
Then again, where did the DNA cells come from ?? Are they human ?? If the test tube is dropped, would it be classified as an illegal abortion operation ?
Could the person who drops the vile be thrown in jail for practicing medcine without a liscence ? This kind of computer could cause quite a few sleepless nights with christian fundamentalists and anti-abortion activists. Of course, I also forgot the slime fetish pervers that are still lingering around after the last Ghostbuster movie.
I seriously think these are issues that will need to be cleared up before bio sciences merge with the technology world.
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
At all the beowulf IMPOSTERS out there who are ripping me off...
Only *I* have perfected the beowulf post to an absolute science. Yes, only *I* have the power to cause 99.8% of all slashdot readers to read a MINIMUM of THREE paragraphs of complete and utter nonsense, before I tell them to:
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these dna babies!
Now, *I* am the Master!
DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
Considering the other technologies in prograss, we will have a built in 'computer link'
Ala the article about Nerve cells hooked to silicon
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Absolutely, every couple of months there is a new news article about a ground-breaking new type of computer. But each time, it's basically just "hey look, we managed to get this to do something that kinda looks like basic computer operations". Quantom computers sound really cool, DNA computers sound really cool, but where is a reasonable long term plan? Where's something to actually get excited about?
I can build AND, NOT and XOR gates out of cats, mice and string. I can string a thousand of these gates together... but i won't be able to install an OS on it in any practical way.
I'll be excited when one of these test-tubes can play mp3s, compile my kernel, and send me instant messages telling me what website i can see AVIs of Britney Spears being ravaged by high school football players at. Until then, i just don't care.
The abiility to do FLOPs does not a Turing Machine make.
lysergically yours
... unfortunately, this figure was calculated using a DNA computer ...
signed,
a small spec of drool.
I am always amazed at the amount of information is contained in DNA. I think they are just making use of that information to compute.
Hmm let's see..
.25"x5"
It took 9,200 Pentium Pro Processors to hit 1.06 teraflops while it takes 1 trillion of these suckers to hit 1 gigaflop (billion-operations-per-second)
A PPro is roughly 2"x1". A test tube is about
So basically if you replaced all those PPro's with these you could build it only using 106 test tubes you would reduce the area needed for just the CPU's from 19200"x9600" (1600'x800') down to 26.5"x26.5" (2'x2') That is some major saving on floorspace down at the co-lo. Absolutly amazing.
"it could form the basis of a DNA computer in the future that could potentially operate within human cells and act as a monitoring device"
... I'm fee ... g-g-g-aaa ... GGGAAAHH ... An exception 0D has occurred at 0028:C003C720000433F."
"Hey, your face is turning blue, what's the problem?"
"I don't know, my doctor recommended this Microsoft stuff, I'm feeling
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
"Since we don't know how to effectively modify these machines or create new ones just yet, the trick is to find naturally existing machines that, when combined, can be steered to actually compute,"
DNA can be used in it's natural state to represent data. But once they figure out how to code DNA at will, then that would seem to be a breakthrough analogous to the the early punchcard computers.
After that, the DNA transistor, right?
98.6% would seem a little more normal...
99.8% accurate.
Which means it'll make 2 million mistakes every second.
I think my bank and government use these.
The Internet is generally stupid
Does this mean that soon you'll have to monitor the health of your computer, and make sure it's well-fed? Man, I can't even keep plants alive, let alone something like a fish.
I can see it now... "Hey man, you up for a game of Quake 5 tonight?" "Sorry, man, can't do it, I went out of town and my roommate forgot to feed my computer."
____________________
Clouds in the Sky,
Water in a bottle
Sounds like the thing is one giant FDIV operation.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Wow. A virus would be a very serious situation for a DNA-based computer.
"All your DNA are belong to us."
...the errors are not systematic. Do the calculation two times and compare and your unidentified errors drops 0.00004th of the whole (provided comparison procedure is not flawed), do it three times and it drops to 0.0000008 and so on. Once possible errors are identified, redoing them, say, ten more times to make sure is not difficult (as you only would have n*0.002 of them, n being the repetition count.) I'm sure one can devise a better system for error correction, but even this crude one would perform satisfatorily.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
The Yahoo article is fairly content-free (and take a lot of space doing it). Here is the link to the the Weismann Institue abstract. http://www.weizmann.ac.il/math/users/lbn/public_ht ml/new_pages/Abstract.html
Note that the 99.8% is what the abstract calls "Transition Fidelity" and is unclear what it means. I take it to mean that from input to output, the answer as read, is corret 99.8% of the time.
It is interesting that they claim to be implementing a Turing machine. Previous uses of DNA has been mostly for the Travelling Salesman Problem with has a (more or less) natural mapping to DNA.
They could plausibly get INaccuracy of .2% to the Nth power. Whoops That's more like it. :-)
Here is a link to a Wired article that talks about moletronics, but also specifically mentions applications of tiny computers. How about we equip planes with 10,000 microscopic black boxes instead of relying on just 1?
c s.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/moletroni
Check out
ISBN 3-540-64196-3
A THREE YEAR OLD BOOK ON THE SUBJECT
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I guess the next thing is to figure out dna error correction... think of the medical benefits of that one
-
Many of you have been complaining that .2% error is pretty bad, but there is a pretty damn easy way to fix this, just compute all the data twice, if you find that two bits don't match, calculate that bit again. Sure it halves the efficiency, but cosnidering how small they already are, and i assume, cheap, it doens't matter
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
This will lead to more paranoia. I'm not someone who worries about little 'might be' theories but dna computers have a lot of promise for snooping and human controll.
... the answare was 'No, I'm not doing anything wrong so what do I have to worry about?"
This is kind of a vallid worry. There were agents in WTC who were plain clothed in what were called civillan pods (groups), Einstien had SS agenst following him, etc... what would stop the use of this type of technology in the future?
Back when carnivore was hyped I asked some friends if that bothered them. Then I asked if it would bother them to have cameras in every room of there house
"Mr. Frank Johnson just violated the DMCA! Private, initiate DNAC 02883 *dramatic pause* perminant mono+limb loss."
How do you tell which ones are which?
I will design a computer for you. An organic computer to calculate the meaning of Life, The Universe and Everthing.... And I will call it ... "The Earth"
I wonder how many trillions of calcs per second each human being could be proccessing?
More like a DNA transistor for how close it is to actually doing anything useful.
:wq
That's Nothing. The other night the star quarterback and the head cheerleader created a practical DNA computer in the back of his Chevy pickup.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Hmm DNA based computers hey...
I can see it now:
A couple of geeks at a network game session comparing their hardware. And then one of them yells out "You reckon that's good! Check out this puppy!"
And then his PC is ACTUALLY a puppy but with like a USB port and stuff poking out all over it.
I don't know why, but that would be awesome!
:)
It's my understanding that all they are doing is allowing molecules to combine into a tremendous number of configurations, then filtering out the ones that don't have the characteristics they'd expect from a solution to a particular problem. Then they just verify the shape of the structure of the remaining molecules. It's only slightly more sophisticated than having a trillion monkeys typing on a trillian keyboards (except in this case, they know when a monkey is close to the answer they want).
It might be possible to solve NP-complete problems in this fashion (i.e. is there a hamiltonian circuit containing N vertices in this molecule's structure), but the amount of time and effort needed to set up the system and filter out the results does not seem worthwhile. Further, this requires that they already know what kind of structure they expect as an answer (in order to filter it out from the rest), so it will only work on problems where they already have a good guess about the answer. Not something you can expect to see as a general problem-solver.
In otherwords, I don't expect to see Apache running on this anytime, ever. Might be interesting for conjecture, but my money's on quantum computing for this kind of problem solving (at least q-bits have a chance of being interfaced with existing computer hardware).
Joking aside, this really does have some interesting potential. Effectively this is a real nano-machine and I would love to read a little more, although I am lucky if I can understand 10% of what is in Nature!
See my journal, I write things there
Just wait until you can plug your IO port into your girlfriend and do some distributed computing. Humans as self-replicating computers...
Inconceivable!
Ratcrows right. DNA computers will be just be np machines that have massive parrallelism. The could do certain algorithms very well but it will not be a general purpose cpu anytime soon. I figure it'd be used as a code breaker first because code breaking comforms to the specs of this machines. namely "general knowlege about the answer".
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Sheesh, the next thing they will tell us is this freaking computer runs on beer. Oh well, better beer than a computer powered by potatos.:-)
Well, it seems to me that there are 4 possible combinations for each set (a-g,g-a,c-s, or s-c) or whatever the combinations are. Wouldn't this make some easy binary computing or even better, make base 4 computing practical. I don't know, maybe I'm full of it and you wouldn't program the dna that way or some such. But its a thought.
on one of these would that be genocide?
I called Fry's about this.
"Do you have any of these new DNA Computers?"
"Is that a brand name?"
"No, it's a new type of computer. Do you have any?"
"No, I don't think so."
"Are you sure? You may not have noticed, these DNA things, they're real tiny."
"No." (starting to sound annoyed)
"In fact you might have thrown them out if they arrived in the mail. They're just about indistinguishable from anthrax spores. Have you checked the vacuum cleaner bag? There might be a few in there..."
{click}
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
I think this approach is more viable and about as accurate..
What if a CPU had a 99.8% accuracy when switching gates ? Well, there'd be a chance of 90% that at least one in 1150 switches would go wrong, or 50% for 346 switches.
(God, I just realised that the accuracy of a condom is much less than that
The Raven.
The Raven
This article at nature.com goes into more detail about what the 'hardware' and 'software' refers to, among other things.
I have a pentium with a floating point error that does almost as good/bad.
Can anyone tell me what kind of degree/education one would need to be involved in things like this...thanks
How about making a Beowulf....oh, nevermind.
But seriously, if they obtain the knowledge to make a 100% accurate DNA computer, what's to stop them from making *us* 100% subservient? They'll know how to manipulate us at the molecular level.
From the article: "The microscopic computer's input, output and software are made up of DNA molecules -- which store and process encoded information in living organisms."
Now the mice can build the Earth Mark Two after the Vogons blow this one up!
And we can finally know the Question to the Ultimate Answer....
AOL IM? ICQ? Yahoo Chat??? Bah! I use Bitwise baby! http://www.bitwisechat.com/ My BW ID: virginia
we need a new bug fix, similar to the Pentium FDIV problem.
This would be to fix the Intel RNA Splice Rounding Error.
Click here.
That's it, mod me up, you can do it.
or averaging. if 2+2=4 10 million times, but 2+2=5 only 20 times, the system could compare... this kind of thing isnt my forte, but I imagine those with more practical computer architecture experience could tell you.
-
Really though, the fact they can do this at all is quite amazing. Early electronic computers were plagued with similar issues (such as the infamous 'bug', a moth got stuck in a relay). Perhaps a speck of dust in the test tube threw off a few computations...the modern equivalent of that pesky moth.
-
whos to say they werent using sound logic? Perhaps a contamination in the test tube caused problems. cosmic rays from space wreak havoc with electronics all the time. I guarantee your computer (as all electronic devices) is having single bit errors as we speak. But thanks to error correction, it keeps going. There is no such thing as a 100% infallable computer, which is why its the holy grail.
-
I'm sure they could of got plenty of DNA from the massive amounts of the blood of the Palestenian they've spilt.
Go ahead. Mod this down like crazy. Precisely why I posted anonymously.
Yes.
:-P
Otherwise if they repeated the operation a billion times they'd have close to 0 accuracy... that would suck huh?
Daniel
So I'm a computer/biologist kinda person.
To help clarify this I have read the original papers on this stuff. Basically the billion operations per second is for one strand of DNA. If you put a trillion strands of DNA in a test tube that is a whole lot of computational power.
Now the article is a bit misleading in terms of the DNA which is actually being used for data storage, the actual process performed on it are being done by various enzymes. I guess the easy way to visualize it as the basic turing machine at this point.
The error comes in terms of the fact that the enzymes are not 100% accurate, but human DNA can be trascribed and operated on with a far higher fidelity than what these guys are reporting so the accuracy is one of first things that will rapidly improve.
Hope that helped.
OK, I'm very short on details, but
when Adler came with the idea of quantum
computing for the Traveling Salesman problem and a proof of concept experiment (1995 I think),
it was immediately refuted, because
for any practical problem, the number of
different oligo's required to sample the solution
space would take too long to synthesize and
weigh far too much. But I didn't read the original
document, admittedly.
but can it parse sendmail.cf?
DNA is not comprised of cells, nor are cells comprised of DNA. DNA is short for deoxyribonucleic acid, as everybody knows. DNA is simply a molecule formed from four different base molecules that have a tendency to bond together in a spiral fashion. DNA is not alive, nor does it magically spring into life. It's simply one type of amino acid. Amino acids are found in lots of places. Arguing that DNA is a lifeform is like arguing that sugar or a cake recipe is a cake. Life on earth just happens to use DNA as design instructions for how to build itself.
"I don't mean to get off on a rant here," but I can't find anything intelligible in your post. No offense.
A solution to the problem with music today
Unfortunately, each one of them will fight with it's neighbor until none are left to compute WTF happened.
So how long until one of these, or more, are put inside the 'shell' of a virus, thus giving the fanatics a highly targettable and highly efficient biochemical/biomechanical weapon?
99.8 % accuracy, 2 billion instructions/second = 2 million errors / seconds. Even a pentium looks smart compared to that.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
"Instead of using figures and formulas to solve a problem, the microscopic computer's input, output and software
are made up of DNA molecules -- which store and process encoded information in living organisms."
After I read that I thought the next sentence would talk about their plans to use Palestineans as computers.
I prefer to plug and play...
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
of course I made this calculation with a DNA computer.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
Here's a reference to the original DNA computer used to solve a traveling salesmand problem and an explanation of how DNA computing works (and where that 0.2% is coming from) http://www.englib.cornell.edu/scitech/w96/DNA.html
Yes, I am posting as a Coward, but only because I can't remember my username/pass... anyways onto the topic.
These 'computers' aren't exactly using DNA. They are using the same style protiens that form DNA, but it isn't DNA. Plus, as many people have stated any ol combination of DNA will not create anything. This is especially true because these components have to form up genes from protiens before anything that might become annoying can happen.
Not only that, DNA itself cannot become self-aware. For the most part, there has to be a complete organism. Stating that this stuff can become an intelligent virus is like saying that the CPU in your computer can become an intelligent and wipe out the internet. These protiens are being used in a rather simplistic machine, nothing even remotely as sophisticated as true genes and organisms.
Please, all I ask is that people learn a little about the technology/idea before trying to bash it. I personally stand against cloning, not because of the ethical issues (although it is a good reason), but the fact that it will help make the gene pool for the cloned species shallower, helping contribute to problems. A little understanding may change your mind, but it might also give you a truly valid reason to bash the technology.
Regards,
Adam Thayer (krevinek@mac.com)
Press releases, FAQ, pictures, and an explanation of the findings may be found here.
-- Tobin
Well, it certainly would give new meaning to the term "virus".
I'll stick with my Tandy for now.
--
Too many people are saying this "computer" will make 20,000,000 mistakes per second. Rather than thinking of it as a computer, why not think of it as an artificial brain. Your brain certainly makes mistakes. Why should an artificial one be any better?
Wow, just imagine a trillion Israeli scienists in a test tube. It's a snug fit, but in such close proximity, they still perform a billion operations per second!
I think we should build another DNA computer and put a whole international consortium of scientists into it! Just imagine the results.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
"LONDON (Reuters) - Following Mother Nature's ..."
Don't blame yahoo, they just host the story.
I don't work for em, just sticking up for em.
That's two million errors per second!
"Since we don't know how to effectively modify these machines or create new ones just yet, the trick is to find naturally existing machines that, when combined, can be steered to actually compute."
This sounds more like learning to control chemical reactions than building computers! They used an existing "computer", they didn't build it.
However, I posted my comments on the issue hours ago, and I would like to place them here for the sake of, um, conversation in a more communal setting than a personal weblog:
So The Creator invented error-detecting and correcting codes, or their equivalent, a few billion years ago? Makes me more of a believer in a divine intelligence.
Enby in Waltham
These computers would be excellent for computing out answers to problems using genetic programming. When you write programs that modify themselves you want to create random subroutines and expect things like deformity caused by rf or in this case a natural
And for other applications this technology can easily be checked for errors with common methods. Lets face it computer engineers have been dealing with error correction for decades now. They won't have any problem fixing a mere
AOLDYMSA report in the year 2999...
the millenium gunk problem.
biological computers may spew out blue gunk for the new millenium, as fears mount that the 2% inaccuracy totals itself up until an auspicious date, just to piss people off.
y3k engineers predict massive suffocation from the blue gunk of death (bgod) if no action is taken.
Let's see, 1 Trillion computers performing 1 billion computations. So that's 1000 computers per 1 computation. Is this the next generation of Windows?
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
An amazing technology in development nonetheless.
Take a moment to consider how many stunted and rebellious cells your body is producing and hosting at this moment and...hey!...you still work! Albeit subpar compared to the latest CPUs.
Defining microbiology/genetics strictly in terms of "computational accuracy" as per "current industrial standards" is gatespeak to begin with although I'm sure that like OSS, this wouldn't have been possible without microsoft developing a favorable market...
I left some DNA on one of my dirty socks last night, can I hook up a power supply and hard drive to it now? In a way, it would be self-upgrading, since I use the computer to get porn, so I can expell more DNA, so I can get more porn so I can...
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
"By the way, how could anything become *slightly* self-aware? Either it is, or it isn't. There's no middle ground."
BTW what makes you think self-awareness is a "binary" function. Considering life in general, and organically is primarily analog in nature.
Self-awareness could very well come in shades from black to white. There's very little "middle" ground in Life.
I know that it is funny and all to joke about millions of wrong answers a second and all, but isn't this already the case with normal computers. I know - at least the PIII/P4 and Athlon and i assume most other chips - have branch predictors that try and predict which branch to take (the itanium works mutiple branches). The point is that a good branch predictor is 95-98 percent accurate or 2-5% wrong. So it's really not that big a deal.
from a CS perspective, this does NOT solve NP.
:) )
why? because you switch from an exponential time brute-force method to an exponential cpu-number brute force method.
and practically, there's a limit to the number of molecules you can use.
so the issue is not CS one: it means you have a much higher n in which the problem starts being impracticle.
e.g. you will probably need a cipher the size of a DNA molecule for your future PGP (no, wankers of the world, your own is not good enough, since 99% is like any othres'
Working for necessity's mother.
Yeah, and how do you find them after a plane crash? Scan all debree with a microscope?
So how do they get the answers out of the test tube?
We almost have an impropabilaty drive! :>
Looks like a bunch of sad wannabes if you ask me.
*bzzt* wrong!
If a comment is modded up as "Overrated" it receives no word next to the score, therefore one can be modded and have no word next to one's score.
I should know, I wrote the code.
CmdrTaco
Essentially don't DNA computers and quantum computers operate in the same way: simultaneously computing over all possible values (or in DNA, a whole heck of a lot of values), and retrieving the single correct answer at the end (via collapse in QM, via chemical filtering in DNA)?
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
completely dont believe this story. I just assume there is some "oh by the way" sort of detail left out that makes this technology completely useless or just a lie. // a translation?
Can anyone give me [not exactly a tech] reasons to believe this
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Although the error rate seems rather high (0.2%) for a computer, there are all sorts of things that could be done to combat this. Someone mentioned something about CD-ROM read errors, and I'd like to expand it. On a data CD-ROM, well over half of each CD-ROM sector is used for error correcting code. Thus, CD-ROMs make lots of errors, but they're fixed before they get to the computer. Also, many uses of computers can handle the occasional error. Visualization programs could benifet greatly from the increased speed, and any uncaught errors would simpy be seen as the occasional visual defect. If the error rate is brought down enough (as it would be with good error checking) a human observer wouldn't even notice the rare glitch. Similarly, scientific simulations, which already take into account the somewhat random nature of physics, could deal with simulation errors the same way they deal with instrumentation errors: through repeated trials and finding trends.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
These computers are not fast. The only reason they seem fast is that they can perform millions upon millions of operations at the same time. No one said they can do these operations quickly, and what's easy to see, is that they actually do these operations very slowly.
Take for instance today's CPUs. Imagine one person digging a hole. Today's CPUs, that would be one person digging a hole very fast (millions of operations per second). Now contrast that with DNA computers. Well, you have a billion people, all shoveling. Except this time, they shovel at 1 operation (1 dig) per week! That's how slow this is.
The gain in parallelism is the big win here. You can do many operations at once, they just take 10000x longer. But this would be immpratical for any type of user grown system. Unless you're thinking of using it for long operations only (i.e. you explicitly send long operations to your DNA module).
Also it's easy to see the difference between Quantum and DNA computing. Quantum computing is a new way of computing. New algorithms are developed, etc. DNA computer is today's computing, just massively parallel (and brutal latency).
Being intelligent, they will no doubt farm us as we farm cows.
You mean like the ant people that farm the Precious Moments people in the year 802,701?
Maybe not.Will I retire or break 10K?
What if I accidentally reformatted my brain with one of these computers?
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
.. in the prime number generation code used, for example, in the RSA Public Key encryption system.
In that you need to manufacture very large prime numbers, the process of which usually involves randomly choosing a large odd number and (after running a few trial divisions for trivial factors) using a probabalistic prime number test.
Each execution of the test will return either a "definitely not a prime" message or a "maybe prime". The chance of it returning a "maybe prime" when it's actually a composite is someting like 1 in 4. You basically run the test many times with different seeds until either it says it's a composite (and you choose a new random number) or you have a high confidence that your number is in fact prime.
Of course the result might be wrong, but you're more likely to die by the sun exploding after just winning the lottery so I wouldn't worry it.
The 2% failure sounds pretty damned good provided the re-runs are independent.
Simon
Hasn't anyone read Blood Music by Greg Bear?
It's an excellent piece of Sci-Fi. I liked the part where the Original Scientist was made into a theme park.
Gives Blue Screen of Death a whole new meaning...
Of course some parents will opt to put some kind of embedded Linux on the kid. The poor kid then later in life finds that something called GPL is prohibiting him/her to have sex with that gorgeous hunk/babe in the corner café running Win DNA..
What a wonderful new world we have to look forward to.
PS: I'm kidding damn you.. ;o)
Nothing to see here...
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
Incredible! I'm surprised that no linux weenies have made a comment about porting...
And how tough is it to read these inaccurate answers?
You order your input data and "software" from operon or genset (or you buy your own oligonucleotide synthesizers and techs to run them), and you read your output on an ABI 3700, which at ~384K Phred quality >20 bases per machine per day and the six bases per bit encoding used by the Weizmann folks yields something like ~64K bits per day from your $150,000 output transducer.
The I/O will be be a deal killer until olgio synthesis is fast and cheap and until somebody perfects them nanopore capillary sequencers on a chip. So stop surfing and get back to work.
-Matt
I see all these comments talking about how .2% error rate is so large. That is a valid point.
I just find it humorous. Imagine they got this to be 60% accurate. People would comment, "Cool, that's awesome. The potential is enormous. Let's wait until they get better accuracy." But now, that the accuracy is all-the-way at 99.8%, people comment on how bad it is.
I understand what is being said. I just find it amusing.
Have you read my journal today?
There's a difference between a program failing on .00001% of operations, and the uptime of that program.
.0001 seconds)
.0001/.0011 ~= 9%, a far cry from 5 nines.
If a crash costs you x seconds in downtime, and a crash occurs every y seconds, %uptime = y/(x+y). (I'm ignoring the possibility of failures trying to bring your system back online.)
So imagine some fabulous system where you could rollback and recover from a crash in one millisecond (x = 0.001 seconds).
The failure rate of your 99.99999% accuracy at one billion operations per second is 10,000 failures per second, or one failure per nanosecond (y =
So your uptime is a fabulous y/(x+y), or
...think of the applications! :)
Add some wireless capability and you'll really know when somebody's "happy to see you".
'Course there could be some ramifications to that:
Q: "Damn, look at the state of his, er, you know! Is he always like that?"
A: "24/7 since he pissed off those script-kiddies!"
.2% * .2% = .2/100 * .2/100 = .04 / 10000 = .0004%
:^)
or 4000 errors per second
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
It's possible that the rate of accuracy could greatly be increased if different scientists/programmers/what have you were to undertake the task. Given that both the 'hardware' and 'software' of this project was figuratively 'programmed' (are we going to need to invent new terms for this type of computer?), I suspect that the error rate could be decreased by more development and/or testing.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers