
Network of cytoskeleton molecular motors parallely solves NP-complete problem - cbennett
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/02/17/1510825113
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brudgers
What I find interesting about this is the potential for biologists to sort of
dogfood their own computing platforms for biology related problems...e.g.
protein folding. Not saying it's going to happen, but there's possibly an
interesting symmetry between computation and experimental apparatus.

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cbennett
That's precisely right. I think between this and some of the upcoming work in
memcomputing (& self-organzing electronics more broadly), we have a new set of
tools which may resemble 'physical oracles' . IE, these special systems can
compute exponentially difficult problems through thermodynamics or whatever
other quantum-ally optimal properties biology has evolved to use. They may not
be universal computers at first, but they ultimately may point the way forward
towards that vision.

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CarolineW
This was discussed at length yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11186640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11186640)

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cbennett
thank you for linking it through.

