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Computer Made From DNA And Enzymes
develop writes "Some folks from Israel have created a computer that runs on DNA and enzymes and is supposedly 100,000 times faster then today's PCs. Information at National Geographic, Telegraph UK and United Press." According to the National Geographic story, this DNA-based computer "can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC." However, be aware that most of this is still future tense, and what these researchers have now is just a proof-of-concept.
I wonder when they'll get up to the computational speeds of the human brain. Hmm-mmm.
E000-VB14-G8RY
Could this be a stepping-stone to one day being able to create simple life forms from scratch?
Additionally, if a DNA computer gets a virus, could it spread to humans?
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
they should have put this quote in the FRONT of the article so we don't get all excited over nothing. saves a lot of reading too.
btw - I wonder how they will allow interation (no nasty thoughts please) to a DNA computer; actually - how do they make "JMP" instructions in DNA? enzymes don't just skip a few million pairs for shits and giggles. told it to do so...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Not just that, but they go from "have created" to "proof of concept" in the blink of an eye. Blech...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
not entirely true...
its more like the software we run on our brain is dogmeat compared to current software, take an autistic person, the ones that are walking calculators they breathe pump there heart perform complex calculations all without leaving there own little world, plus the human brain has an insane ammount of bandwidth, your streaming two framebuffers of video of a quality unsurpassed by any computer, and audio from two sources with the same quality as the video, plus constant sensations of feeling, the air blowing accross your skin, right now my sore throat. tell me of a computer with that kind of bandwidth?
I was first introduced to DNA computing by Leonard M. Adleman's article Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems which describes using DNA computers to solve problems such as the notorious Traveling Salesman problem.
The basic idea is to coerce a ton of DNA into producing random potential solutions to the problem, and to then use chemical processes to select "good" solutions in mass. Since the space of possible solutions to Traveling Salesman problems of any reasonable size is tremendous (larger than the national debt expressed in pesos) DNA computing has an edge over traditional methods, because solutions are easy to generate and then weed out.
Unfortunately, this is really just a gigantic parallel processor - with each strand of DNA the memory of a processor induced by the chemical manipulations, and a small subset of useful algorithms are parallelizable (can be broken up into small "chunks" that can be computed independently and tied back for a larger result.
The immense benefit that this technology will have will be in fields like evolutionary computation. Evolutionary computation relies upon generating large populations of solutions, and then applying simple rules (which could be chemically encoded) to "improve" the generation, towards the pursuit of some ultimate goal. This could be training a neural network to predict coronary artery disease, or optimizing the design of a jet engine without tackling fluid dynamics - truly wondrous!
Trillions of Computations per second?
Come on. Trillions of Chemical Reactions per second is more like it. I admit they were very creative to come up with a problem that could be encoded in DNA, but there is no computation going on IMO.
Vinegar and Baking Soda generate a trillions of computations per second too, but the result is always an overflow.
The abstract is available here. I've taken a look at the article since I have a subscription. The system implements a finite automaton, as opposed to Adleman's research which solved a much more complicated (NP-complete) problem. Also, the error rates are definitely too high to be useful at this point, but this is still intriguing research.
DNA computing isn't new but it seems no one on /. has emphasized that the breakthru is using DNA as the source of fuel as well as information.
On second though why is that a good thing. Anyone care to elucidate?
Yeah, but because of the interconnections between neurons - at least 100 can be connected on one branch, and each neuron can have 100s of branches - you can do many ops per fire - it's like distributed computing at a neuron level. In fact, it's supposedly massively-distributed, whatever that means (better than the CS lecturers can manage with their beowulf clusters, I guess)
OKay, so in recent history, some research groups from Israel have come up with the following:
1.) Quantum computers that cracked RC5 in a few miliseconds.
2.) "True AI" like HAL that they would raise from infancy and would be sentient.
3.) "Unbreakable" encryption.
4.) DNA computers that are 100,000 faster than any desktop PC (but whoops, it's only a PoC).
There's a few more, but I cannot recall them all. These were all posted on Slashdot, but I am lazy and don't feel like using the pitiful search function here to find them. I'm sure others will remember.
So what is it with "researchers" from that country coming up with all kinds of impossible and implausible discoveries that nobody else has even come close to producing... and then we never hear from them again? Is it common practice there to create a bullshit storm to get project funding or a bigger budget? Can someone clear this up for me?
Disclaimer: I am not anti-sematic or anything, I just want to know what the deal is.
Why bother.
DNA Computing reminds me of analog computing devices, where the computation is instant, because of forces that bring a physical system into equilibrium. But it's the pre-processing and post-processing that are time-consuming. Consider a bunch of uncooked spaghetti sticks in your hand. Let us further suppose their lengths are proportional to a list of numbers you have with you. Hold them vertically against a table or other flat surface and release your hand. Bam! The spaghetti sticks fall into equilibrium. Then, from this bunch, pick out spaghetti sticks in ascending order and voila, you have sorted your list of numbers. Likewise, consider 5 burettes or other calibrated water-columns whose bottoms are all connected to a common tube. Use stop-cocks to separate each water column. Fill up the burettes with water corresponding to some list of numbers you have. Release the stop-cocks and the water level in all the burettes equalizes to the average of those numbers. Fun with analog computing!
Is there any way to factor a huge number with DNA computers? Similar to how that travelling salesman problem was solved, you could put every prime encoded into DNA, add em together in a test tube where they will all be magically multiplied :P, and look for the number you want.
Seems about as plausible as this article anyway...
yeah, actually theres alot of post-processing and guessing that goes into the senses... the eye for instance... it is constantly moving to take different images of its context, if one is to use a special device to hold the eye completely still, said person's vision will fade out until the device is removed and teh eye can resume normal operations. also, there is a hole right in the middle of your field of vision where all the nerve endings go back through the retina... cause they connect to teh front not to the back like one would think, so your brain has to fill in that hole.. The brain does alot of processing of form, it trys to interpret everything we see, its really interesting, i mean, ever seen someone do acid?? hehe, but seriously, our hardware is horribly inadequate, so we have to come up with our own systemes to compensate for it
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