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.

Comments

Imagine!

[Whitecloud]

Imagine what a beowulf of these would look like!

A small step

[kramer2718]

In 1994 Leonard Adleman solved a seven node instance of the Hamilton Path problem with a DNA computer. As many of you know, this problem is NP complete. That means that only exponential time algorithms (for sequential computations) are known for it. Adleman's machine ran in linear time. RSA decryption is thought (although not proven) to be NP complete. Since then, many NP complete problems have been solved in polynomial time. (I devised an algorithm for Set Cover.) The secret? Massive parrallelization requiring expontential space. Basically, there are so many DNA molecules foating around in the tube and so many enzyme that if you combine them cleverly, you can create all possible answers to a problem. You can then cull out the right answers. The expontential space is the drawback to DNA computing. There is a hard upper bound on the number of DNA molecules that can be used in a computation (for reasons I don't fully understand). It looks as if the article refers to a universal turing machine of sorts implemented in DNA. This an improvement over the previous algorithms which were just hand crafted machines.

POC means praise our creativity

[rodney dill]

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain the computer really is performing 330 trillion operations per second.