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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.
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?"
but the kids only have a 60% accuracy. My wife blames me...
:(
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
1. Imagine a BEOWULF cluster of these!!!
Ha ha.. I've heard that joke so many times, it's started to be really funny. I even say it at bars... someone points out the nice rack on this girl who walks in and I yell out "IMAGINE A BEOWULF CLUSTER OF THOSE!" and everyone gets real quiet and stares at me like I'm crazy or something....
- kengineer
"99.8 percent accuracy"
"Yikes, I've got the blue gunk of death!"
Oh!....Oh!....Oh *Shit*! We're fucking surrounded by solar powered DNA based machines! They're everywhere! I have to put my tinfoil hat back on now.
I don't even know why I read the news anymore.
I don't even know why you bother to post here anymore.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
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
Don't worry--if the viruses you postulate become reality, they will depend on us for their existence. Being intelligent, they will no doubt farm us as we farm cows. You will have a place in the new order.
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
How do you tell which ones are which?
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).
that kinda made me think that 'rack-mount' can have some very different meanings...
sic transit gloria mundi
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