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This is analog computers all over again. It suffers the same problems, namely lower reliability and a lack of precision. I don't see how this will stack up to

This is analog computers all over again. It suffers the same problems, namely lower reliability and a lack of precision. I don't see how this will stack up to the millions of man-years humanity has invested into silicon based computers.

ItsMe000001 8y ago
> This is analog computers all over again. No it is not. Analog computers were used before good digital computers could be produced, for the same roles and straightforward problems. Life solves problem at scales that you cannot even touch with "precision" and in completely different ways. The problem is thinking that those systems are supposed to be used instead of computers. I reality, they are to tackle much different problems. Also see my longer comment here. Whenever you have a problem that you can nicely solve with a silicon-based computer you don't need a biological system. Also don't forget that biological systems are still settings the targets for things like AI or robotics, from which our silicon-based systems still are very far away from reaching. They do that with added features of self-replication and self-healing.
- SanityIsRare 8y ago
  Life doesn't solve "problems" though - it just creates random order from chaos. What kind of problems do you even have in mind? What would you even solve if we could somehow understand or control these bigger forces of organization? I agree with the OP, we are not replacing silicon with DNA or anything - this article is just another "tech" article that shouldn't exist.
  - ItsMe000001 8y ago
    > Life doesn't solve "problems" though Wait, what? Biological systems are not solving problems? It does so all the time! Seriously? > it just creates random order from chaos. You get that with just physics, on a large scale for example the formation of galaxies and stars, or when things self-sort by weight in a gravity field (heavy stuff goes to bottom of a solution, lighter stuff goes to the top).
    - SanityIsRare 8y ago
      No, they don't solve problems, it's just natural selection in an environment with lots of randomness. Life didn't even start out by solving problems, as I said: random order from chaos. Life doesn't care about solving problems, it's just collection of random matter. Given enough random matter, you are destined to get some with odd properties in right conditions that can also spiral out of control to create something like a human.
      - ItsMe000001 8y ago
        > No, they don't solve problems, Of course they do. Being alive presents all kinds of problems. I mean, seriously man... I don't understand the things you write, really strange stuff, I'm at a loss.
        SanityIsRare 8y ago
        Life didn't start out because it had the problem of not being a thing. Can it still be considered "problem-solving" when the so-called "problems" are only so in the context of animal survival and breeding from the perspective of animal consciousness? Life just randomly grows and takes on random shapes, it's not a force of problem-solving.
        jacobush 8y ago
        Yet, here we are, solving problems.
        SanityIsRare 8y ago
        You are not life, you are a human, a lifeform - product of life.
        SanityIsRare 8y ago
        Life would extinguish itself if it was the force of problem-solving, because that would ultimately solve all the problems. I don't know how can you create a problem-solving force from an environment where none exists. You can only create forces of chaos from such an environment.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  > No it is not. Analog computers were used before good digital computers could be produced, for the same roles and straightforward problems. Actually, analogue computing was still widely used for simulation and the like in many industries well into the 70s and 80s. Though often augmented with digital computers, for various purposes (simulation series, automated recording/reporting etc.)
  - CamTin 8y ago
    I think "70s and 80s" is well within the definition of "before good digital computers could be produced" in the context of many industries. You guys aren't disagreeing.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      16 bit minis were, well, not common, but still used in numbers in labs and the like. Consider that d. computers are mostly used for information systems nowadays, meanwhile analogue computers were not used at all for that purpose. So apart some inventive examples I won't rule out, no company migrated from paper to analogue computing to digital computing, because analogue computers were not suited for information systems. That's likely why analogue computers persisted for fairly long after the introduction of digital computers: they solve very different problems, and an analogue computer could solve simulation problems at a speed that the 16 bit mini right next to it would never achieve. Also, they are highly modular (in fact they are nothing but a bunch of fundamental modules like integrators, diffs and other filters that the user interconnected as required) and very easy to extend with specialized circuitry and the like. Thus, from a purchase/investment point of view, analogue computers could easily be scaled, while this was more difficult with digital computers.
nnq 8y ago
> analog computers all over again Biological coding is quite digital/discrete in its nature, from genes up, that's why it scales and has things like error correction. You can get all the precision you need if you get EC and statistics right. Now that will be the biggest challenge. (And getting statistics right is essential even for something like a modern CPU that always has at least a few broken transistors in it but still works.) What we see as "individual organisms" at the large scale are analog in their functions, but this is an illusion. The actual units of information or transmissible programs are nothing but digital. Life likes discrete/digital building blocks for complex machines for the same reasons we humans like them in our technology, nothing special here...
jerf 8y ago
Analog computers were just digital computers with a different computational paradigm. That is, they had the same IO mechanisms, just how the Input became Output was slightly tweaked. Biological computing will be interesting primarily because it will be able to build things, which neither analog nor digital computers are particularly good at. It's an entirely different paradigm. The act of computation can also be the output.
- klmr 8y ago
  > Analog computers were just digital computers with a different computational paradigm. No, there are fundamental differences. Digital computation is inherently error correcting because there are only two states — on or off. With analog computing, errors compound over long times and there’s fundamentally no way to fix this (it’s not just “hard”, it’s theoretically impossible). That’s why analog computation is fundamentally limited in scale, it can’t handle complexity through abstraction. Modern computer science is fundamentally tied to digital computation. This is also why evolution relies on a digital (albeit not binary) storage medium (DNA), and if we every have useful biological computation, it will likewise be digital.
  - jerf 8y ago
    This is another case of "cutting off my quote too early". Compared to the difference between what biological computation and digital computation is going to look like, what we call analog and digital computers are brothers, because they share the same basic IO. ("No, they have differences..." Yes, they do... but compare to biology. A valid input to a biological computation process will be your physical body. Not some numeric representation of it, but the actual thing. This is inconceivably foreign to either the modern digital computer paradigm or anything we've ever called an analog computer. By comparison, whether someone is typing "17.213" onto a screen or setting a dial somewhere vaguely in the region of 17 is a minor detail!) Biological computation won't be digital. It'll have digital components, but it will neither be intrinsically digital the way current computing is as it will inevitably be operating in an analog domain, nor will it resemble our current computing paradigms.

ItsMe000001 8y ago

> This is analog computers all over again. No it is not. Analog computers were used before good digital computers could be produced, for the same roles and straightforward problems. Life solves problem at scales that you cannot even touch with "precision" and in completely different ways. The problem is thinking that those systems are supposed to be used instead of computers. I reality, they are to tackle much different problems. Also see my longer comment here. Whenever you have a problem that you can nicely solve with a silicon-based computer you don't need a biological system. Also don't forget that biological systems are still settings the targets for things like AI or robotics, from which our silicon-based systems still are very far away from reaching. They do that with added features of self-replication and self-healing.

SanityIsRare 8y ago
Life doesn't solve "problems" though - it just creates random order from chaos. What kind of problems do you even have in mind? What would you even solve if we could somehow understand or control these bigger forces of organization? I agree with the OP, we are not replacing silicon with DNA or anything - this article is just another "tech" article that shouldn't exist.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  > Life doesn't solve "problems" though Wait, what? Biological systems are not solving problems? It does so all the time! Seriously? > it just creates random order from chaos. You get that with just physics, on a large scale for example the formation of galaxies and stars, or when things self-sort by weight in a gravity field (heavy stuff goes to bottom of a solution, lighter stuff goes to the top).
  - SanityIsRare 8y ago
    No, they don't solve problems, it's just natural selection in an environment with lots of randomness. Life didn't even start out by solving problems, as I said: random order from chaos. Life doesn't care about solving problems, it's just collection of random matter. Given enough random matter, you are destined to get some with odd properties in right conditions that can also spiral out of control to create something like a human.
    - ItsMe000001 8y ago
      > No, they don't solve problems, Of course they do. Being alive presents all kinds of problems. I mean, seriously man... I don't understand the things you write, really strange stuff, I'm at a loss.
      - SanityIsRare 8y ago
        Life didn't start out because it had the problem of not being a thing. Can it still be considered "problem-solving" when the so-called "problems" are only so in the context of animal survival and breeding from the perspective of animal consciousness? Life just randomly grows and takes on random shapes, it's not a force of problem-solving.
        jacobush 8y ago
        Yet, here we are, solving problems.
        SanityIsRare 8y ago
        You are not life, you are a human, a lifeform - product of life.
      - SanityIsRare 8y ago
        Life would extinguish itself if it was the force of problem-solving, because that would ultimately solve all the problems. I don't know how can you create a problem-solving force from an environment where none exists. You can only create forces of chaos from such an environment.
blattimwind 8y ago
> No it is not. Analog computers were used before good digital computers could be produced, for the same roles and straightforward problems. Actually, analogue computing was still widely used for simulation and the like in many industries well into the 70s and 80s. Though often augmented with digital computers, for various purposes (simulation series, automated recording/reporting etc.)
- CamTin 8y ago
  I think "70s and 80s" is well within the definition of "before good digital computers could be produced" in the context of many industries. You guys aren't disagreeing.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    16 bit minis were, well, not common, but still used in numbers in labs and the like. Consider that d. computers are mostly used for information systems nowadays, meanwhile analogue computers were not used at all for that purpose. So apart some inventive examples I won't rule out, no company migrated from paper to analogue computing to digital computing, because analogue computers were not suited for information systems. That's likely why analogue computers persisted for fairly long after the introduction of digital computers: they solve very different problems, and an analogue computer could solve simulation problems at a speed that the 16 bit mini right next to it would never achieve. Also, they are highly modular (in fact they are nothing but a bunch of fundamental modules like integrators, diffs and other filters that the user interconnected as required) and very easy to extend with specialized circuitry and the like. Thus, from a purchase/investment point of view, analogue computers could easily be scaled, while this was more difficult with digital computers.

nnq 8y ago

> analog computers all over again Biological coding is quite digital/discrete in its nature, from genes up, that's why it scales and has things like error correction. You can get all the precision you need if you get EC and statistics right. Now that will be the biggest challenge. (And getting statistics right is essential even for something like a modern CPU that always has at least a few broken transistors in it but still works.) What we see as "individual organisms" at the large scale are analog in their functions, but this is an illusion. The actual units of information or transmissible programs are nothing but digital. Life likes discrete/digital building blocks for complex machines for the same reasons we humans like them in our technology, nothing special here...

jerf 8y ago

Analog computers were just digital computers with a different computational paradigm. That is, they had the same IO mechanisms, just how the Input became Output was slightly tweaked. Biological computing will be interesting primarily because it will be able to build things, which neither analog nor digital computers are particularly good at. It's an entirely different paradigm. The act of computation can also be the output.

klmr 8y ago
> Analog computers were just digital computers with a different computational paradigm. No, there are fundamental differences. Digital computation is inherently error correcting because there are only two states — on or off. With analog computing, errors compound over long times and there’s fundamentally no way to fix this (it’s not just “hard”, it’s theoretically impossible). That’s why analog computation is fundamentally limited in scale, it can’t handle complexity through abstraction. Modern computer science is fundamentally tied to digital computation. This is also why evolution relies on a digital (albeit not binary) storage medium (DNA), and if we every have useful biological computation, it will likewise be digital.
- jerf 8y ago
  This is another case of "cutting off my quote too early". Compared to the difference between what biological computation and digital computation is going to look like, what we call analog and digital computers are brothers, because they share the same basic IO. ("No, they have differences..." Yes, they do... but compare to biology. A valid input to a biological computation process will be your physical body. Not some numeric representation of it, but the actual thing. This is inconceivably foreign to either the modern digital computer paradigm or anything we've ever called an analog computer. By comparison, whether someone is typing "17.213" onto a screen or setting a dial somewhere vaguely in the region of 17 is a minor detail!) Biological computation won't be digital. It'll have digital components, but it will neither be intrinsically digital the way current computing is as it will inevitably be operating in an analog domain, nor will it resemble our current computing paradigms.