2 ms·
Yup. These ideas have been kicking around for 25 years. In theory, you could use DNA-based reactions to solve problems. Since DNA is quite small and the reacti
by mattkrause 7y ago
Yup. These ideas have been kicking around for 25 years.
In theory, you could use DNA-based reactions to solve problems. Since DNA is quite small and the reactions run in parallel (more or less), you should be able to brute-force some otherwise intractable problems. The classic example of this is Adleman (1994), which uses DNA to find a Hamiltonian path. (here: https://www2.cs.duke.edu/courses/cps296.4/spring04/papers/Adleman94.pdf https://www2.cs.duke.edu/courses/cps296.4/spring04/papers/Ad...)
In practice, anything involving DNA is a bit fussy and error prone, and exponential growth means you'll eventually drown in DNA too.
- dekhn 7y agoWhen Adleman gave a seminar I was an undergrad at UCSC. We chatted with him afterwards and it was fun to calculate that, using his design, if we wanted to scale up to solve more interesting problems, you'd have to have a bathtub's worth of solvent and very good mixing (better algorithms aren't as wasteful). I don't see any DNA-based computing or storage systems as being capable of outdoing a general purpose computing system that already exists off the shelf, for the foreseeable future, for any reasonable use case.