
A computer made from DNA can compute the square root of 900 - EndXA
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2228461-a-computer-made-from-dna-can-compute-the-square-root-of-900/
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spectramax
Scott 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-
lecture...](https://gess.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/paul-bernays-
lectures/bernays-2019.html)

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
Sad, 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.

~~~
heavenlyblue
Every 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
At 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
Yeah, 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.

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wtvanhest
We know this is true, because most people can compute that it is 30. The
interesting thing is how little dna is required.

~~~
adamgravitis
This is the furthest thing from the truth. That a human has a certain
capability does not in the slightest imply that “DNA”, at least as commonly
understood, encodes that capability, at all.

A bunch of molecular recipes encoded in a few gigs of nucleotides with some
crude feedback loops do not a human make.

Quite apart from epigenetics as it’s commonly presented (methylation, and all
sorts of histone antics), you might recall that DNA itself doesn’t magically
grow up: you do need a cell.

It’s somewhat (and only poorly) analogous to being handed the source code to a
C compiler written in C, without knowing C. Does the C code really encode C?
Well, not without the compiler it doesn’t....

There’s then a very interesting discussion around how it’s even possible for a
mammalian nervous system to bootstrap itself. Figuring out walking seems
perhaps emergent: it’s a learnable technique based on not falling. But how do
dog breeds retain intrinsic high-level behaviours even if they’ve never
observed them? What makes a Shepherd so concerned when his assumed flock
becomes dispersed?

We are a tremendously long way from answering these questions, but I would
caution anyone who thinks it just “in the DNA”.

~~~
SirHound
Our lad was making a joke

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SeanLuke
Long 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. :-)

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HocusLocus
Good Golly Miss Molly when the coin miners discover this tech, the Earth will
be waist deep in goo.

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baalimago
I can't wait for the first artificial neural network written in DNA.

~~~
eunos
I do wonder however whether there exist a deep learning architecture built
with real neurons.

~~~
phpspacestabs
is that not what you and I are?

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saalweachter
Nah, everyone knows our brains are just quantum antennas for communicating
with our immaterial souls that just coincidentally resemble neural networks.

~~~
logicallee
This is the best explanation for why AI is impossible.

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ddingus
Man, 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

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sndean
I 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
No, but that is cool.

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gus_massa
The "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
I'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.

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wslh
I 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)

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mikepalmer
It even solves many word problems correctly! “If I have $90 and a cookie costs
$3, how many cookies can I buy?”

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SlowRobotAhead
None, because now you owe $9997 dollars to cover the costs of the DNA
calculation.

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toppy
It'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)

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frutiger
It's interesting to consider that humans are computers made from DNA too.

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czbond
No idea why people are downvoting you .... it's not like this is a far out
statement. People get offended when I just call us "meat computers".

~~~
frutiger
And most of the other top-level comments express the same sentiment as mine
but at a later time. It’s definitely not worth trying to understand the whims
of HN voting.

