

Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators - onreact-com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/jul/24/bacteria-computer

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RiderOfGiraffes
My computer can solve TSP on three towns far, far faster. This shows
calculations can be done with bacteria, but there's no evidence at all that it
will be faster, especially on NPC, even with the extreme parallelism the
method implies.

It's typical journalistic hype.

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theblackbox
indeed, I don't doubt that once we can do parallelism on par with the
biological world in neural network models (which are probably already
available or being researched) many of these studies will be thought of as ill
considered funding streams. Not so sure about chemical processors - I still
expect the pay off from this research to be fantastically beneficial for all
sorts of domains.

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theblackbox
When this discipline was first starting to kick off I remember a little
experiment done to tap into and code the DNA of a particular strain of
bacterium (probably similar to this E-coli). In doing so the playful
scientists encoded the phrase "I am the riddle of life, solve me!" into junk
DNA sections of the organism.... it always made me feel a little queasy
thinking about it being found by whatever civilization is around a thousand
years from now! What would it do to their fundamental picture of life? I'm
sure the same could be said about organic computation. It's an open-ended
chaotic system, where really all we control is the initial starting
conditions. Who's to know that after we've got our "answer" the continued
adaptation leads to something vastly beyond our control/comprehension. I guess
it's all part of the "ghost in the machine" paranoia surrounding AI, except
these things will not be ghosts and the machine is DNA.....

</alarmist diatribe>

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jacquesm
To really get your head spinning, what if you used 'strings' on your own dna
and you found some interesting ascii segments in there, on 4 billion basepairs
the chances of finding something interesting are pretty good ;)

~~~
antaeos
But remember, we see faces in clouds. We seem predisposed to bullshit our
selves in similar fashion.

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nopassrecover
That's what he was saying..

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tocomment
I always wondered if we could could find something in nature that shows P=NP.
It could be bacteria, autistic savants, dna computing, etc. Has anyone set up
a test like this?

I'm thinking you simply increase the number and inputs on an NP problem and
watch at what rate the time taken by one of these methods increases. (Is this
too naive of an approach?)

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zitterbewegung
Here is something that scientists have studied which does this
[http://www.tjhsst.edu/~rlatimer/techlab06/Students/OuyangPap...](http://www.tjhsst.edu/~rlatimer/techlab06/Students/OuyangPaper06F.pdf)

They actually take the approach that you state. They also have to judge how
the system solved the problem. If you don't reach an optimal state you could
be only approximating P=NP.

~~~
tocomment
That's an interesting paper.

I wonder why we can't make a "soap surface" computer? Just translate your NP-
Complete program into a Steiner tree problem, make the appropriate glass
plates and pegs model, get the results and translate back?

I wish I knew more computer science. I'd love to try it.

~~~
zitterbewegung
You could do that exactly. The problem is that the soap surface computer
doesn't always perform the task to find the best steiner tree etc...

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tocomment
Why is that? Is it approximating then, or just unreliable?

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zitterbewegung
Unreliable it doesn't necessarily give the best steiner tree or a good answer.
Sort of hazy on this mainly just googled this information.

~~~
tocomment
That's a shame. I wonder if we could find other natural processes like this? I
wonder if electricity seeming to instantly know the path of least resistance
could be wired up to solve traveling salesman somehow?

