QUOTE: You get the point. Nintendo is never going to lose. They have a core market which will keep them in business for a long time. Not to mention the European launch: 400,000 units sold through in 3 weeks. Wow.
there is only one rule in this business---never say never.
look, there's a "compact disc" logo on my CD player at home and a "compact disc" logo on CD-ROM in my computer. if sony wants to sport a "compact disc" authorized logo on their music, it had better damn play in both or else it happens to be an optically-read 4.5" platter that is misusing red book certifications and patents. case closed.
well, that ass nugget didn't invent PCR all by himself--he took his Cal colleague Norm Arnheim's discovery of temperature cycling of DNA polymerase and then stuck in a thermostable enzyme derived from Thermus aquaticus or more commonly Taq, then promptly screwed the other guy out of the patent and the nobel prize. kary is a jerk.
I don't think DNA will be viable for most standard computational tasks, or for a practial turing machine. Biological systems don't use DNA to do logical operations (that I know of), and the only thing they use it for is for data storage (instructions for building proteins). The only operations (under normal circumstances) an organism does with DNA is copy. Mutations (reversals, transpositions, etc.) occur because of chemical errors. That is the only operation it does really.
this is not entirely true. nucleic acids are responsible for quite a few things in the cell. yes, DNA is not very reactive, designed to be a stable archival form of genetic material, but RNA (ribonucleic acid) is a different story. derived from DNA, it has a 2' hydroxyl (-OH) group on its sugar (hence the name ribo- instead of deoxyribo- which has a 2' hydryl (-H) group) and is much more reactive, causing cleavage, ligation, and other enzymatic modifications. there are programmed errors and very regular processes in the cells, things like SOS DNA repair, nonhomologous end-joining, and crossing over, that can result in modification. there is so much here to study it can make your head spin! so don't count any of it out =)
let me shed a little info on this work for you guys. i'm a graduate student working in len adleman's lab--i'm not an author, but i am very familiar with the details of the project.
first off, concerning the complexity of the problem: we like to say that this is the first truly non-trivial problem solved with a DNA computer. len's original traveling salesman problem (solved in 1994 and published in Science) has something like 4 cities and could be easily solved by a human with pen and paper in a matter of seconds. subsequently, several other NP-complete problems have been attempted: most notably the "knight problem" (how many and where can one place knights on a chessboard so they cannot attack each other) and 3-CNF-SAT (3-conjuctive normal form satisfiability) with no known polynomial time algorithm (not including quantum polynomial tome algorithms).
this work is a 20 variable instance of 3-CNF-SAT, with a combinatorial diversity of 2^20 possible outcomes, meaning ~ 1 million possible solutions. the 3-CNF-SAT problem was contrived to produce only 1 possible combination that would satisfy the formula. for a human with pen and paper, this problem would take several hours, if not days, using a brute force method of attack. an electronic computer, however, would solve it in a matter of seconds.
so to draw an analogy, the DNA computer is probably somewhere near the ENIAC was in the 1940s. Electronic computer development was growing rather slowly until the development of the transistor in the 1950s, and we have been benefitting from Moore's Law ever since. a similar technological breakthrough will be needed for DNA computers to seriously rival the computational power of silicon.
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QUOTE: You get the point. Nintendo is never going to lose. They have a core market which will keep them in business for a long time. Not to mention the European launch: 400,000 units sold through in 3 weeks. Wow.
there is only one rule in this business---never say never.
look, there's a "compact disc" logo on my CD player at home and a "compact disc" logo on CD-ROM in my computer. if sony wants to sport a "compact disc" authorized logo on their music, it had better damn play in both or else it happens to be an optically-read 4.5" platter that is misusing red book certifications and patents. case closed.
well, that ass nugget didn't invent PCR all by himself--he took his Cal colleague Norm Arnheim's discovery of temperature cycling of DNA polymerase and then stuck in a thermostable enzyme derived from Thermus aquaticus or more commonly Taq, then promptly screwed the other guy out of the patent and the nobel prize. kary is a jerk.
I don't think DNA will be viable for most standard computational tasks, or for a practial turing machine. Biological systems don't use DNA to do logical operations (that I know of), and the only thing they use it for is for data storage (instructions for building proteins). The only operations (under normal circumstances) an organism does with DNA is copy. Mutations (reversals, transpositions, etc.) occur because of chemical errors. That is the only operation it does really.
this is not entirely true. nucleic acids are responsible for quite a few things in the cell. yes, DNA is not very reactive, designed to be a stable archival form of genetic material, but RNA (ribonucleic acid) is a different story. derived from DNA, it has a 2' hydroxyl (-OH) group on its sugar (hence the name ribo- instead of deoxyribo- which has a 2' hydryl (-H) group) and is much more reactive, causing cleavage, ligation, and other enzymatic modifications. there are programmed errors and very regular processes in the cells, things like SOS DNA repair, nonhomologous end-joining, and crossing over, that can result in modification. there is so much here to study it can make your head spin! so don't count any of it out =)
let me shed a little info on this work for you guys. i'm a graduate student working in len adleman's lab--i'm not an author, but i am very familiar with the details of the project. first off, concerning the complexity of the problem: we like to say that this is the first truly non-trivial problem solved with a DNA computer. len's original traveling salesman problem (solved in 1994 and published in Science) has something like 4 cities and could be easily solved by a human with pen and paper in a matter of seconds. subsequently, several other NP-complete problems have been attempted: most notably the "knight problem" (how many and where can one place knights on a chessboard so they cannot attack each other) and 3-CNF-SAT (3-conjuctive normal form satisfiability) with no known polynomial time algorithm (not including quantum polynomial tome algorithms). this work is a 20 variable instance of 3-CNF-SAT, with a combinatorial diversity of 2^20 possible outcomes, meaning ~ 1 million possible solutions. the 3-CNF-SAT problem was contrived to produce only 1 possible combination that would satisfy the formula. for a human with pen and paper, this problem would take several hours, if not days, using a brute force method of attack. an electronic computer, however, would solve it in a matter of seconds. so to draw an analogy, the DNA computer is probably somewhere near the ENIAC was in the 1940s. Electronic computer development was growing rather slowly until the development of the transistor in the 1950s, and we have been benefitting from Moore's Law ever since. a similar technological breakthrough will be needed for DNA computers to seriously rival the computational power of silicon.