3 ms·
Network of cytoskeleton molecular motors parallely solves NP-complete problem
- CarolineW 11y agoThis was discussed at length yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11186640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11186640
- cbennett 11y agothank you for linking it through.
- brudgers 11y agoWhat I find interesting about this is the potential for biologists to sort of dogfood their own computing platforms for biology related problems...e.g. protein folding. Not saying it's going to happen, but there's possibly an interesting symmetry between computation and experimental apparatus.
- cbennett 11y agoThat's precisely right. I think between this and some of the upcoming work in memcomputing (& self-organzing electronics more broadly), we have a new set of tools which may resemble 'physical oracles' . IE, these special systems can compute exponentially difficult problems through thermodynamics or whatever other quantum-ally optimal properties biology has evolved to use. They may not be universal computers at first, but they ultimately may point the way forward towards that vision.