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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"
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.
Probably because each one does a tiny bit of a computation. How many transistors are there in a modern chip? Uh-huh. Now you get the idea.
When you're dealing at the atomic scale, just flipping a lever or doing something mechanical takes the place of all those little electrons flowing through logic gates.
Given the level of our technology, I suspect that these little DNA "computers" are a lot more like a transistor than they are like a Pentium IV.
To get your head around things at this scale, go to http://www.foresight.org/ They've got several excellent nanotech books there that you can download electronically for no charge. Well worth it.
Pat
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
...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!
>can someone explain WHY it takes 1000 computers per operation?
Maybe each operation is duplicated 1000 times, and the answer that comes out 998 times is chosen?
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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
eh, 3 billion base pairs.
4 possibilities per base pair, which means that a byte (the computer byte) can hold the info of 4 base pair. Therefore the human genome is roughly 750MB (fits on a CD with a bit of compression).
It's how it's used that counts.
sic transit gloria mundi
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).
The big stumbling block with DNA computing is setting up the problems and interpreting the answers. For now, the hardware consists of arrays of test-tubes, DNA sources (mouse DNA does some great stuff), and enzymes which are used to setup and unlock/interpret the results based on how you setup the initial problem. Genetic computers, like life, will always deal with squishy, fluidic stuff, and as such should never, ever find itself in day-to-day home use.
There is an incredible paradigm differential between established Von-Neuman computer science and biological computing systems that everyone should equate the complexity of DNA computing with Quatumn Physics, and know that even when people think they "get it", they don't. Really-Really.
Anyone worried about having to feed their computers should relax, and consider themsevles very very lucky to live long enough to see that happen. Long before consumers have access to DNA-based computing, the NSF and Military will be using it as an excuse for billions in black-ops appropriations and maybe even declare it off-limits to the market once they figure out how to use it to crack encryption key namespaces.
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Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those?!
I am a Beowulf cluster of those.
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.
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