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Researchers Debut DNA-Powered Computer
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Columbia University and the University of New Mexico have built a DNA -powered computer that is unbeatable at Tic-Tac-Toe. Although it's much slower than a normal computer, the researchers say their proof-of-concept system could help them develop new techniques for sorting and analyzing viruses and DNA mutations."
I thought most Tic-Tac-Toe games end in a tie.
That's exactly what unbeatable means - cannot be beaten. It does not mean it can beat you.
Is it just me, or does the title seem.. misleading? Powered by DNA? It's not really feeding on people's genomes in order to meet its energy requirements. :[
That press release ("a DNA Pharmaceutical Tablet...an entirely new form of Data Codon") is pure gibberish. Between the incoherent language, the weird secrecy and the fact that this seems to be a one man operation, I'd strongly suspect Graemme Brown is a crank.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The point is that they can be scaled enormously at low cost, and should be useful (eventually) for massively parallel calculations. So playing tic tac toe over ten minutes is not impressive. But what would you say about doing 10^16 (or more) calculations in that same 10 minutes? It's ridiculously cheap to replicate DNA strands, so once you get a "cpu" sequence you like, you can expand it with a few bucks worth of chemicals, and away you go.