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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.
"computer made FOM" . . .?
How lovely.
funny munging
330 trillion calculations per second? Impressive, but can it run Doom 3?
Earlier today I hawked up a loogie in the parking lot. While at the moment it is only a puddle of goo, or "proof of concept", I predict that this collection of DNA and enzymes will someday be capable of performing over 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC!
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
I wonder when they'll get up to the computational speeds of the human brain. Hmm-mmm.
E000-VB14-G8RY
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those machines...wait a minute, I am one!
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.
I hear Feed Only Memory is the future of storage.
I don't think I'd be responsible enough to remember to feed my computer.
Now we can finally learn the answer to Life, the Universe... and Everything!
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
It may perform 330 trillion operations per second, but it has NO PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS for that computing power. (Read the stories).
;-)
Granted that it's interesting....but it's not much further along than quantum computing.
Also, I'm wondering if Guinness would recognize my computer where I mix two liquid chemicals together and they change color as a computer that can switch froms 0s to 1s more-or-less instantly and on a massively parallel scale
-psy
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.
If an organic computer is vapourware, does it smell like a fart?
Trolling is a art,
LFS. Have you built your system today?
WTF? Has the world gone mad?
I am made from DNA and enzymes!
My brain performs more than 330 trillion ops/sec (stuff like image analysis, speech recognition, "AI",...)
AND YOU DARE CALL ME "just a proof-of-concept"!?!?
Welcome to the miracle of birth (and cloning). This is the 21st century!
Listen, buddy. I'm the result of billions of years in the evolutionary compile-link-debug cycle. So just show some bloody respect. Would you like to see my proof-of-concept gross-human-mutilation firsthand? No? Then keep your childish insults to yourself!
(from Israel ... hmmm ... do they cut the PS/2 port off the end of the keyboard cable? *just kidding, folks* )
This sig intentionally left bla... dammit!
Who's got the whiteout?
To understand all the hype, here is an article about how DNA computing works. DNA Computing, interestingly, was first proposed by Prof. Len Adleman (of RSA fame), who used it to solve the famous travelling salesman problem for seven cities. He encoded the cities in DNA such that only valid tours could react and form longer strands. The reaction was instant and presto - he had a solution (pun unintended ;)) in a gazillionth of a second.
Here is the bad news. The solution to the problems might be instant, but programmability and reading the output are still headaches. It is interesting to note that it took Adleman several days to read the answer even though the DNA computer "figured out" the answer in no time. But its a promising technology that would be refined in future no doubt.
-Dracken
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!
It's hard to tell from the limited detail in the articles, but this just sounds like what's been done previously, only with a larger number of molecules. The nature of DNA computation as it exists severely limits the real-world usefulness of DNA computing. It's nothing like a general purpose CPU. It involves (at least) several hours to manufacture a bunch of DNA to do a one-off run of your algorithm. Basically, it would be very adept at the any computing tasks that could be effectively addressed by a beowulf cluster of a few billion Intel 4004s, if there are any such tasks. Photonics is the most likely face of computing in the future, with quantum computing filling the niches that only it can fill.
For great justice.
Imagine what a beowulf of these would look like!
Perhaps a little like a scandinavian warrior from the 6th century!?
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
And in news just in,
INTEL creates a 2Tera htz pentum 5..
how ever this is jsut proff of concept,
dont expect to see it before 2015..
I meen come on,
theres been plenty of 'proof of concept'
about DNA/emzine computers..
its not like the proof off concept behind
something that is though to be imposible..
so right now, what they have is vaporeware??
a blueprint for something they think
'might work'
that the 'could posibly build'??
and hear was i thinking something had
been done..
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
If you read the article you'll notice that this isn't a programmable computer. It's yet another test-tube experiment in which DNA was pre-programmed to return a pre-defined result, engaged in a chemical reaction, and then the resultant data read from the DNA at a later time. So while the experiment itself likely took many months or years, they claim that "330 trillion calculations per second" were performed because that's the duration of the chemical reaction divided by the number of bits of information that were changed. You can't ever access that data and you can't program the machine, but hell, that's how long the chemical reaction took... I'm decidedly unimpressed.
Yeah, and on page 79 is a article about a newly discovered Amazon tribe 'untouched by modern man'.
Yet the women have remarkably perky breasts..
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
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.
Person1: What did you do with my laptop? Those things don't just grow legs and walk away!
...
Person2: Uhm, well, uhh, this one did
In the long run, we're all dead.
My brain performs more than 330 trillion ops/sec (stuff like image analysis, speech recognition, "AI",...)
The human brain has between 10 billion and 100 billion neurons. They can fire up to 100 times per second. 100 billion * 100/second is only 10 trillion per second.
So we must assume that either:
1. you have an enormous brain (3.3 trillion neurons would weigh about 50kg), or
2. that they fire very quickly, (you overclocked your brain and run around with a heatsinking hat and have to eat 20x a day) or
3. that you do some 'thinking' without using neurons.
Hmm, that last option seems to be the most reasonable. How's that working out for you, anyway?
Something fast enough to run Everquest.
They actually implement a 2-state finite state automata with a two letter alphabet. The approach is basically something like the following. The 'hardware' is a restriction enzyme that is an offset cutter. The 'software' are pieces of DNA with 4-base DNA overhangs.
The transition table is essentially coded in the software DNA molecules. The current state of the machine and the current input symbol is coded for by a unique 4 base overhang. The software DNA has 4 base overhang to match a particular state, symbol. The software DNA binds to the input DNA, and then the restriction enzyme, since it is a 9-base offset cutter to the right, cuts the input to be in a new state. Something like the following:
Changing the number of ? spacers in the software changes where in the input you cut and therefore chooses between two of the possible set of four base overhangs for the next state. All the energy for the computation comes from breaking up the input DNA.
Based on their model, the maximum number of states possible in the FSA appears to be dependent on the size of the offset for FokI and I think it's like 5 states. (Possible to have more states with larger offset cutter?) The maximum number of automata state and input symbol combinations, since they use a 4 base overhang appears to be 4^4. So it's not quite general enough to match any regular expression, and not even close to a read/write tape for a Turing machine, but is an interesting approach.
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?
uh, actually the bandwidth is pretty pathetic, it's just that evolution has done a great job of adapting constrained to the limitations of wet ware. the "unsurpassed" quality of human vision is only at the center of your field of view (where you need it), the rest of your retina is low resolution and optimized primarily for motion detection. our skin is likewise fairly low resolution (there's places on your body that can't discriminate between two touches over a centimeter apart), but it's high resolution where it needs to be (primarily the finger tips).
it's okay that we have such low bandwidth, as our brains wouldn't be able to handle more bandwidth anyway.
Today we're computing with Denatured Alcohol.
When will the madness end?
KFG
So, when one of these catches a virus, it REALLY catches a virus. Better stock up on PC-cillin.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
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.
My computer...? It's ALIVE !!!
$DEITY bless $NATION
The immense benefit that this technology will have will be in fields like evolutionary computation.
Are you trying to say that DNA could be of some practical use in genetic algorithms? That's pretty hard to swallow.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
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!
Lets see here a computer made with DNA and enzymes. This would be technology close to creatures. Then we give it an artificial intelligence so it can do work for free. Sounding familiar yet? If not then here is what could happen. They revolt, huge war, and we end up as batteries. And then we won't have to worry about doom III because the world which we are plugged into will be before Doom III. Wait, maybe doom III is a conspiricy, by the machines? Okay maybe not.
FOML: Rise to Power
As many of you have pointed out, DNA computers are not going to replace conventional electronic computers. Len Adleman, the inventor of DNA computing, has said "Despite our successes, and those of others, in the absence of technical breakthroughs, optimism regarding the creation of a molecular computer capable of competing with electronic computers on classical computational problems is not warranted." The problem is partly the effort required to read the answer once the solution is available, and partly the effort required to perform the computation itself. Reading the answer from the first DNA computation took Adleman about a week, and reading the answer from his most recent DNA computation (the largest computation ever performed) took two weeks. The computation itself was very manpower intensive: thousands of precise moves were required of a human experimentor to get the necessary components in a test tube, but once they were all in, the computation itself happened virtually instantly.
Although I have only read the popular accounts of this experiment and not the actual results, this experiment seems to simply be using the ATP in DNA as the power source for the computation instead of external ATP. This is impressive, but it is not the "technical breakthrough" needed to propel DNA computing to the everyday world.
The claim of this computer working 100,000 times faster than a PC is probably true. But this speed comes from the parallelism inherint in DNA computation. When each computer is only 1 molecule in size, it is easy to have 10^10 computers in one tube. But if you do the math, this says that each individual molecule is 100,000 times slower than a PC. So it is equally true to say that my PC is 100,000 times faster than a DNA computer, its just that I can't afford millions of them. This also says that DNA computers are not good for computations that are serial in nature: the speed comes from the fact that DNA computers can run in parallel.
That being said, there may be specific applications for DNA computers in the future. Because of their parallelism, DNA computers are great at solving NP-complete problems (not fuzzy logic problems, as said in the article). This does not make them tractable, however. They run in linear time, but take exponential space. So instead of the problem that "solving this problem will take the age of the universe" you run into the problem "solving this problem will require the mass of the Earth in DNA".
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...
Well, I don't know about inferior PCs, but this isn't 100,000 times faster than the fastest G4. The fastest Apple G4 is the Dual 1.42 GHz. It has a peak performance of 21 Gigaflops, or 21 billion operations per second. Now let's break that down:
- Divide 21 by 2, since there are 2 processors after all = 10.5 Billion ops per second for one G4.
- Working in Billions, 330,000/10.5 = 31428.57
As you can see, the DNA computer is only 31,428.57 times faster than the fastest G4. The MHz (GHz) Myth is destroyed once again. Go Apple!Request: ECM unit, 1000 km fullerene cable, 1 tactical nuclear weapon. Reason: Birthday party for foreign dignitary.
You should check these two columns, DNA supercomputers in our future? and DNA Computing to learn more about the limitations of DNA computing. For example, Len Adleman, a professor at the University of Southern California, says "that DNA computers will never be able to rival their electronic counterparts for speed without an unforeseen scientific breakthrough, he does think that they have a future niche. One day, a DNA computer programmed to react to the presence of a toxin, such as cancer, could be embedded into a cell. When it detects the toxin, the computer would respond by directing the cell to replicate and chemoluminesce or "glow." The glow could be seen with the naked eye allowing for early disease detection and saving lives."
In this column, you'll find my comments on both the "Computer Made from DNA and Enzymes" article, published by National Geographic News and "New DNA Computer Functions sans Fuel" story provided by Scientific American. But more importantly, you'll find the real *meat*, the abstract of the research conducted by the scientists of the Weitzmann Institute of Science. It is published in today's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Also, as the Nat'l Geo. article says, one of the best applications for this technique would be in calculating "fuzzy" problems where you would like to compute many possible solutions and then find the correct one. While it is true that this might speed up the actual calculation of the individual results, there would still be the issue of searching through all the results for the optimal or desired answer, which is no trivial task if you have just a heap of several tens of millions of unsorted inputs. Ultimately, as they allude to, this might become a kind of fancy "co-processor" for certain types of problems in high-end computing, but I have trouble seeing this as a realistic solution for the desktop.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
I did some searching and got two of the articles:
Israeli AI System "Hal" And The Turing Test
I've also noticed this "bullshit storm" and would like to know why they are doing this.
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
sig is broken try again tomorrow