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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
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!
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.