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A computer made from DNA can compute the square root of 900
- gus_massa 7y agoThe "ten building blocks" in the press article are actually ten bits (probably implemented as short DNA sequences chained together). I'm not sure why they can't calculate the square root of 961. These kind of DNA computers had a lot of hype a few years ago, but for the real applications they are too low and difficult to retarget.
- amelius 7y agoI'm guessing that one reason is that I/O is problematic. But once you can do sufficiently large computations (e.g. factoring large primes), I/O becomes the easy part.
- spectramax 7y agoScott Aaronson’s ETH Zurich lectures talk about physical computing (and its limitations, exception being Quantum computing) here: https://gess.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/paul-bernays-lectures/bernays-2019.html https://gess.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/paul-bernays-lecture... He even makes his own “Soap bubble” computer from people who claim that soap bubbles can be used for global parallel optimization problems. Spoiler, it doesn’t work well and gets stuck in local optima as the size gets larger. Before anyone gets too excited about physical computing ideas, I think watching these 3 lectures from prestigious “Paul Barney’s lectures” is a must. They're about Quantum computing but Scott spends a full lecture about Turing/Extended-Turing thesis and what types of computers in past have tried to break those conjectures (and failed). That is why Quantum computing is interesting - he also dispells a lot of myths about QC we hear today in popular media. Fascinating stuff and I highly recommend spending 3 hours to watch these videos if you're interested in the future of computing.
- agumonkey 7y agoSad, I loved the idea of bubble computing. I wonder if there are similar ideas with complex electric fields to model equation and enjoy "RT" (sampling speed time) evaluation of solutions.
- JoBrad 7y agoI guess the bubble popped early for that area of tech?
- heavenlyblue 7y agoEvery time I hear about a sad story of "this scientist had spent their whole life trying to discover the better computing in DNA and failed" I feel like the reporters are not mentioning the fact that actually the scientist knew perfectly well that their model of computation was inherently unscalable and they were simply pulling money out of absolutely oblivious investors. Oh god I love the _idea_ of better computing. But let's be honest, there isn't much of an alternative, is there?
- saalweachter 7y agoAt some point it becomes important to ask yourself, "What would I be content spending my life failing to accomplish?" I mean, it'd be nicer to accomplish it, but if you can find something that you could spend fifty years failing at, that on your deathbed you would simply be happy you tried, that's something really special.
- heavenlyblue 7y agoYeah, but it doesn’t mean these people deserve any pity. They actually did something they love. And the fact is they almost certainly knew the risks involved - it’s not like they were jumping into unknown.
- frutiger 7y agoIt's interesting to consider that humans are computers made from DNA too.
- mirimir 7y agoYeah, I've been thinking of saying that for a couple days :)
- agumonkey 7y agobut we rely on a fat layer of neuronal microcode
- bobbylarrybobby 7y agoIf DNA is code, surely your nervous system is macrocode?
- qgjdvcggd 7y agoDNA isn't code
- Supermancho 7y ago"If DNA is code", set a scenario from which a deduction was made. Denying the scenario, is noise.
- qgjdvcggd 7y agoMaking irrelevant if-statements that reinforce bad science stereotypes and further confuse laymen is worse than noise. Imo
- jagannathtech 7y agoDNA is specs
- johnchristopher 7y ago
- wtvanhest 7y agoWe know this is true, because most people can compute that it is 30. The interesting thing is how little dna is required.
- jedimastert 7y ago> We know this is true, because most people can compute that it is 30. The interesting thing is how little dna is required. I was going to say that "No, it means a computer made from DNA can make another computer from DNA that can compute the square root of 900, but I'm the father of the two year old that will, presumably at some point, be able to calculate it as well. It'll just take somewhere around 10 years(?). I guess the achievement is how quickly it can calculate it, from creation.
- intuitionist 7y agoYeah, it took six or seven years from when I was created to when I could compute the square root of 900, and that’s considered prodigiously fast.
- hazeii 7y agoTBH I think 'most people' being able to work out the square root of 900 is rather optimistic (it would be nice to be wrong).
- baalimago 7y agoI can't wait for the first artificial neural network written in DNA.
- Supermancho 7y agoThe first time I heard about a DNA neural network (from moss) was in the scifi book Slant by Greg Bear.
- eunos 7y agoI do wonder however whether there exist a deep learning architecture built with real neurons.
- phpspacestabs 7y agois that not what you and I are?
- saalweachter 7y agoNah, everyone knows our brains are just quantum antennas for communicating with our immaterial souls that just coincidentally resemble neural networks.
- logicallee 7y agoThis is the best explanation for why AI is impossible.
- ars 7y agoHuman consciousness does not resemble neutral networks. Sure there are some superficial elements that do, but that means ignoring all the most important parts.
- eunos 7y agoPerhaps but I do wonder whether the architectures of ANN works with the real biological neural network. Maybe biological neurons can be an alternative to the power hungry GPU clusters.
- ddingus 7y agoMan, when we can go one layer up, like say DNA = Verilog, and neurons, cells, etc = FPGA, things will change in profound ways. Edit: maybe a couple layers? Anyone knowledgable care to speculate? I would find that interesting to read
- sndean 7y agoI don't think this is quite what you meant, but > DNA = Verilog reminded me of this paper: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6281/aac7341 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6281/aac7341 They made a tool called Cello that uses Verilog to design genetic circuits with simple logic gates and stuff like that.
- ddingus 7y agoNo, but that is cool.
- dnautics 7y agoFor these techniques, the bottleneck in latency will always be DNA synthesis. AFAICT you're encoding your data in DNA as well, which means that actual, precise chemical reactions are required to do this computation, which is 1) always going to be slower than moving electrical charges and 2) going to have diminising yields exponential on the number of steps required to build it. Here is the state of the art: Look at how wasteful it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleoside_phosphoramidite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleoside_phosphoramidite
- ddingus 7y agoYes! And that's what I was speaking to up thread. Totally wasteful. One (or more) layers up, we are not doing any computation via DNA. Maybe configuration and specification are better words for whatever does computation or some other task. Imagine a sub-system. Maybe it's new sensory input, or some inherent comms interface or other we don't have as part of our nature right now. If we think of DNA as some kind of Verilog, then: Say I have a computer expressed in Verilog. I can push that to a chip, and that chip becomes that computer. Later, I want some additional computation capability, or I/O system, display, whatever. Just change the Verilog, and next push, that computer, being the same one a generation prior, now has this new thing. So, we've got "human" expressed as DNA. Rather than compute with the actual DNA, expressing something that can compute is what I am getting at and in only the most general of ways. The DNA basically makes an organism, or some functional bio-tech that is capable of computation, carrying electrical charge, do things we know biological systems can do. They have different strengths from electromechanical systems. Our own brains are kind of slow, imprecise, but look at what they can do! What if a "coprocessor" of sorts could be woven in there? Or, maybe just an interface, form of comms that is not like the senses we have now. Or maybe we leave ourselves alone. (good call, if you ask me), but we end up making living things, task based, maybe not even fully functional beings (probably also good call), that can interact with our existing systems. Living neural nets for more advanced pattern recognition or memory recall, for example? Visualization? That's where the real action / change is, IMHO. And when I asked for speculation, I was kind of hoping people with this interest, or domain expertise might just riff on what such an idea may evoke in their thoughts, impressions, visions of what could come.
- toppy 7y agoIt's worth to mention Leonard Adleman's (of RSA fame) research from 1994 on using DNA to solve Hamiltonian path problem in graphs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing
- wslh 7y agoI wonder how they are a surprised since Leonard Adleman (the 'A' in RSA) developed the field in 1994 solving the the Hamiltonian path problem with seven points[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing
- HocusLocus 7y agoGood Golly Miss Molly when the coin miners discover this tech, the Earth will be waist deep in goo.
- SeanLuke 7y agoLong ago I once attended a conference whose keynote presentation was by a group which was involved in DNA computing. They were talking about using a beaker of solution to compute a Hamiltonian cycle of length, I dunno, let's say 15. I asked how large a beaker would be needed to compute a cycle of length 25. The answer was: about the size of the Pacific Ocean. :-)
- mikepalmer 7y agoIt even solves many word problems correctly! “If I have $90 and a cookie costs $3, how many cookies can I buy?”
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoNone, because now you owe $9997 dollars to cover the costs of the DNA calculation.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]