New Computers?

[8Shade8]

What if you could have a computer that had hundreds of useless Terabytes of memory? There is a way, and a freind of mine has an idea she is trying to get a patent on.

Take a DNA strand. People are still trying to figure out what everything on it does, what parts of it do what and what parts of it control different body aspects.
It takes a computer years to just analyze a single strand of DNA. There are four chemicals and each one have a correspondant that is on the other side of the strand. Well, excuse me for my science illiteracy, but here is the idea:

She was thinking that if you could "reformat" a strand of DNA, erase all of the chemicals but two like this:

A>B
C>D
(there is always these four chemicals on a strand of DNA and I dont feel like looking for them online; I will denote them as A,B,C and D)

She will "reformat" it like this:

A>B
A>B
A>B
A>B

If a computer was programmed to read A as 1 and B as 0 (thus we have binary) we could make computers out of DNA. All she has to do is get someone to make a computer compact enough to change the chemicals and "reformat" and "write" the code. The problem is, is that the computers that the scientists have, that do this for experiments are HUGE.

I think it would be cool if she could pull this off, and become really rich, and just think, in 30 years if they miniturize the tools needed to do that, we could never have to upgrade any thing. Your entire computer could run off of one strand of DNA.

It seems unthinkable now, but they said the same thing about flying and other things a hundred years ago.

[flamingspinach]

You could probably make a Turing machine out of DNA and enzymes. However, it would be phenomenally slow compared to what we have today, not to mention subject to the *ahem* vagaries of fluid dynamics and its effects on organic chemistry.

[8Shade8]

I thought she had a good idea, but there is alot of work to be done on it.

[aperson]

uhh 'reformatting' DNA is not a trivial process, as specific point mutations are not trivial to just go in and splice around, it takes more than a little bit of OChem to make it work. FS is right, you could easily make a Turing Machine (even a Universal one) out of DNA, but it would be a completely arbitrary and worthless way to do it.

The reason computers are slow at creating DNA models is because it uses a dissimilar system from enzymes to check and grab DNA. That isn't to say that DNA is a more optimized system, it just means that it has a slow calculation time via our normal computational methods. flamingspinach is right, it would be slow, and due to the nature of genetics, probably massively ineffective.

[8Shade8]

So yall are saying that you can't run a computer off of DNA, but in the future do you believe it is possible to store mass amounts of data on to a strand of DNA? Even if you cant run a computer off of it, it could be possible to store information, but what kind of genetic tools would they need to do that, and could they miniturize them for home use?

[RandomPscho]

So yall are saying that you can't run a computer off of DNA, but in the future do you believe it is possible to store mass amounts of data on to a strand of DNA?


I bet in the future the amount of data a DNA can store would be obsolete.

[flamingspinach]

You can make a computer, or a data storage device, out of DNA. The point is that it would be a horrible design (in terms of deterministic computing, anyway) and extremely unreliable, not to mention phenomenally slow compared to what we even already have, let alone what we could have in the future. What is your fascination with this? What's appealing about a computer made of DNA? It would be the most useless thing ever.

-fs

[Vests]

Lol, you're saying you can like it has actually be done. Sure it is plausable, perhaps in the next thousand years. None of us are going to see it in our lifetime, we are still working on getting magnetic storage cheap enough to use inexpensivly. Something that hones in on a structure a millionth of a size of a sector is going to be incredibly expensive, and it would have to be given nutritions and enzymes in order to stay alive, which would cost even more money.

No hard feelings joe.

[sherbtail]

I thought I had read about these somewhere... and turns out I had,

heres a link!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing

it was in new scientist that I read about it, I cant remember exactly how the concept works and it doesnt explain it brilliantly on wikipedia

[Illysium]

Why store A as 1 and B as 2? Just use binary in the first place, instead of re-writing the computer's "blood". You can't mathamatically times A and B without converting it to an integer, but that would mean more programming and thus, take longer. But.. *thinks* if you make A equal to B..

int a, b;
a == 1;
b == 0;
cout << a * b \endl;

Or..

a == 1
b == 0
a.to_integer
b.to_integer

It would work "theoretically". I don't understand Binary that well, but each number has a different number, like if I remember correctly, 32 means 21, 34 means 22 and so on, but after 10 more it will change to another letter, 42 means 2B all the way up to 2F. And then it continues from there.

I'm confusing myself, yes it will work. With elbow grease.

[Swoop]

It may be possible in the future but like RandomPscho said it may be obsolete. Also the technology that you would need would cost more that the product thus raising the price by at least 3 fold. And it would be incredibally slow and bulky. You would be better off with a commador(old gaming computer from the 90's for those who dont know) for the size that the "DNA Computer" would be. Plus we already have these handheld computers(Ipod) that have as much memory as the desktop that I am using now, And there are already computers that have terabytes of memory. So my conclusion is that, judging by the rate that our sociaty is advancing, your "DNA Computer" will be obsolete in the future.

[Illysium]

I doubt it would become obsolete, due to the mass sales they would go through in their first year because of the sheer size and efficiecy of the DNA computer, it would immediatly go down in price (Just like the XBOX).

I recently read a small article about memory inside of memory and blank space. It's rather advanced mathamatics, but it basically holds different values in smaller spaces. The motherboards nowadays are so small in size, but think of them at least a 1/3 less! This will be the next generation, then it will probably be either DNA or a mass data system (A world database of files).

[aperson]

Originally Posted by Illysium

I doubt it would become obsolete, due to the mass sales they would go through in their first year because of the sheer size and efficiecy of the DNA computer, it would immediatly go down in price (Just like the XBOX).

DNA computers would be largely inefficient to read. Do you have any idea how error-prone enzymes which act on DNA can be? Biology programs things to be evolutionarily stable, not to efficiently store data.

Why store A as 1 and B as 2? Just use binary in the first place, instead of re-writing the computer's "blood". You can't mathamatically times A and B without converting it to an integer, but that would mean more programming and thus, take longer. But.. *thinks* if you make A equal to B..

Reality check, you can multiply binary elements inside of a computer by using logic operations on each switch. 1 * 2 would just evaluate to 00000001 * 00000010 = 00000010. Multiplication can be done using nothing but AND, OR, and XOR (and probably not even all three of them are required). Typecasting things as 'integers' is actually a much higher level function of programming languages which don't themselves speak the 'blood' of the computer language.

Code:

int a, b; a == 1; b == 0; cout << a * b \endl;

Or..

Code:

a == 1 b == 0 a.to_integer b.to_integer

Have you ever actually programmed in C++? If you said a == 1 the compiler would evaluate the operation as 0 because a is undefined. == is not an assignment operator it is a logic operator.

It would work "theoretically". I don't understand Binary that well, but each number has a different number, like if I remember correctly, 32 means 21, 34 means 22 and so on, but after 10 more it will change to another letter, 42 means 2B all the way up to 2F. And then it continues from there.

I'm confusing myself, yes it will work. With elbow grease.

Each number has a different number? Brilliant Observation. Also, that's hexadecimal you are talking about there, not binary.


In summary,
a) DNA computing has already been done and has been shown to be uninteresting
b) People in this thread need to understand what they are talking about before they post

[nforcer06164]

I might be a bit off here... but couldn't the DNA, being a slow-speed storage device, be used as some kind of mass backup, similar to an external hard drive or a USB flash drive?

[aperson]

Originally Posted by nforcer06164

I might be a bit off here... but couldn't the DNA, being a slow-speed storage device, be used as some kind of mass backup, similar to an external hard drive or a USB flash drive?

The problem is that DNA isn't stable enough to do that. If a few mutations or errors in it occur at some point (which, look at us, DNA mutations happen day in and day out) then your data are ruined. Imagine a USB drive where each bit had a 1/1,000,000 probability of being switched. Even though that's small, it'll happen a lot of times in something that has over a billion bits of storage. Linearized computing systems these days are built to not tolerate errors because the systems we design them on are stable enough to not do these things.

[Illysium]

It's hexadecimal? Well they covered that during a Binary lesson so that is what threw me off.

b) People in this thread need to understand what they are talking about before they post

I'll remember that, thanks.

[RandomPscho]

It's hexadecimal? Well they covered that during a Binary lesson so that is what threw me off.

It doesn't matter at all. All your doing is changing number bases. Otherwise converting between them all is the same logic, just with different bases. A computer uses only binary; 0 and 1's. Either on or off of electricity on the chip. Decimal is the normal number system, which uses a base of 10. Hexadecimal is using a base of 16 to shorten the amount of characters needed to display binary. Each digit in hex is equal to four digits of binary, making it a LOT shorter than writing out the fill binary. There could be a base of any number.


Wouldn't you have to use RNA instead of DNA? DNA is a helix with two sides, inverses of each other, so it could be read on either side, both giving you different information.

[aperson]

Originally Posted by RandomPscho

It doesn't matter at all. All your doing is changing number bases. Otherwise converting between them all is the same logic, just with different bases. A computer uses only binary; 0 and 1's. Either on or off of electricity on the chip. Decimal is the normal number system, which uses a base of 10. Hexadecimal is using a base of 16 to shorten the amount of characters needed to display binary. Each digit in hex is equal to four digits of binary, making it a LOT shorter than writing out the fill binary. There could be a base of any number.


Wouldn't you have to use RNA instead of DNA? DNA is a helix with two sides, inverses of each other, so it could be read on either side, both giving you different information.

It depends on what kind of reading system you have to read the data. There are some systems, actually, that are programmed to interpret both the stimulus and the negative image of a stimulus (such as Hopfield Nets). Systems like these could read either side of the helix and grab the proper information set from them.

Theoretically, you could have a hopfield net trained to recognize the array of commands that could come from the DNA blocks, and then use the hopfield nets to error-correct and send the information to some higher processing level.