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Under what plausible circumstances would you consider DNA-based or chemistry-based computation to be a superior solution compared to silicon-based computation?
by bmh100 10y ago
Under what plausible circumstances would you consider DNA-based or chemistry-based computation to be a superior solution compared to silicon-based computation?
- psyklic 10y agoThe linked paper discusses using its enormously parallel nature to quickly solve large instances of NP-complete problems. Aside from this, imagine taking a "smart" medication that uses biological computation to determine exactly where/when in your body to optimally release the medicine.
- bmh100 10y agoYour second sentence makes sense to me. That capability is a clear advantage.
- _nalply 10y agoCurrently neither DNA nor chemistry is superior to silicon. Adleman made a proof of concept that DNA could be made to execute computations. So at least it's doable, but practically it doesn't make sense. And nowadays ASiCs for accelerating deep learning is the best we have for massively parallel computation, I think. It's more about thinking what we could do if we had gazillions of little things swimming in a solution or sitting on a die that could do computation for us. For me one important result is that it doesn't scale for huge NP complete problems. Add a few hundred more variables to a SAT problem and you don't have enough water in our whole world. This reminds me of the old story of doubling the amount of rice for each square on a checker board. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem