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Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing
- dnautics 7y agoAs someone who spent 10 years at the forefront of synthetic biology (and has programmed for 30+ years) I always found the biocomputing baffling. I would be willing to bet against Cellular Supremacy over any time frame, except evolutionary or geologic timeframes.
- api 7y agoYour brain consumes about 40 watts and you wrote that sentence.
- dnautics 7y agowhy do you assume that writing that sentence was computationally hard?
- ThisIBereave 7y agothe closest computational equivalent to writing that sentence we have today involves executing a model with 1.5 billion parameters. (and I couldn't find an estimate of the energy cost of that)
- api 7y agoIt's many orders of magnitude larger than 40 watts * 5 seconds. :) I have a running bet with some friends that one of the following is true: (1) The brain is somehow leveraging quantum computing to achieve polynomial or square root acceleration on combinatorial search and optimization problems. (2) P=NP and there exist polynomial time classical algorithms for these problems. (3) The naturalistic hypothesis fails and intelligence is somehow "supernatural" and does things that cannot be described or modeled within the confines of physical space-time. I cannot think of any alternative that can possibly explain how the brain can do what it does on ~40 watts. Everything we have learned to date argues that intelligence and cognition involves a whole lot of massive combinatorial problems that can't possibly be performed classically on so little power.
- 3455er 7y agoThe brain is not a von-neumann architecture. We have different architectures that can perform computation million times more efficiently than general computers. Of course, they lose on other axes (like precision). Whats 54398456905 * 23423645745? Your 40 W brain can't compute that in a minute, yet a 0.01 W calculator can in a millisecond.
- api 7y agoWe can build less accurate computers and analog computers. Neither of these even begin to approach what brains can do. A self-driving car's computer takes hundreds of watts to run, uses reduced precision and custom silicon wherever possible, and does not begin to approach the navigational ability of a mouse or bird whose brain consumes less than one watt of power. The human brain didn't evolve to perform consciously explicit and exact calculations on huge numbers, but our navigational and positional awareness abilities do far more impressive things with far more data much faster than this. A monstrous amount of effective but subconscious number crunching is involved in being aware of where your body is in space using nothing more than vision and sensorimotor feedback, taking apart auditory input (including FFT-like transforms), etc. I really think CS people suffer from Dunning-Kreuger when they hand wave around the impressiveness of biological systems. Study some actual biology and neuroscience. What biological systems do as a normal part of metabolism and cognition is as awesome and mind-blowing as the vast energies, times, and distances found in astronomy. Computers are specialized devices that perform impressive feats of specialized computation but they do not even approach what biological systems do in terms of total data throughput per unit energy, learning ability, or associative and versatile memory to name just a few. Edit: computers seem so impressive to us because we built them specifically to do the things we didn't evolve to do very well, but I have little doubt that if there were some kind of evolutionary forcing function selecting us for conscious explicit number crunching ability we would not need computers and wouldn't have built them.
- 234rwe4 7y agoParent was making the point that we have no computer with a similar architecture as the human brain (billions of tiny compute elements). Artificial neural networks try to simulate that, but the simulate billions of parameters on thousands of core (CPU/GPU). Of course it's highly inefficient, just like for the brain is highly inneficient to exactly multiply two numbers. So you also suffer of Dunning-Kreuger, you imagine that all that computers can be are von-neumann machines.
- zitterbewegung 7y agoAre you measuring training and or inference ?
- russdill 7y agoSo? The brain had a heck of a lot more than 1.5B parameters
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dnautics 7y agoJust for reference, you should know that the more-or-less minimum feature size for a biological structure is about 100 nm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA#/media/File:DNA_nanostructures.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA#/media/File:DNA_nanostruct... that's only about 100x smaller than contemporary transistor features, so realistically there is a upper limit to the energy benefit of biocomputing structures which is about 10,000x, based on energy typically scales with size squared.
- hirundo 7y agoUseful evolutionary timeframes are days to months when the substrate reproduces in hours or minutes. Just a few generations can produce very significant adaptations via massive parallelism.
- text70 7y agoThe only way I could see it having any relative application would be improved finite control of magnetic fields around metallocene or porphyrin cores, through engineered photo-reactive protein shells.
- ArtWomb 7y agoIt appears that "Supremacy" isn't going away ;) Overall, a very enjoyable read. As long as we are speculating on the limits of bio-based computatbility, The same physical constraints governing inanimate systems would of course apply to biochemical reactive systems. What biologic does buy you is reproduction. An proclivity to seed machines over a wide geographic or cosmic area that is self-propelling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation
- Rexxar 7y agoThis way to name things give me the impression that science is not any more about advancing knowledge but about to find the most grandiloquent way to speak about your work. All this "quantum supremacy" and now "cellular supremacy" seems really disturbing. As they propose the term in this article, I hope that someone will found a better name. It's an interesting subject and it deserve a better name.