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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
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
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).
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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