#biological computation

[selfawarepatterns]

Biological computation and the nature of software

A new paper is been getting some attention. It makes the case for biological computation. (This is a link to a summary, but there’s a link to the actual paper at the bottom of that article.) Characterizing the debate between computational functionalism and biological naturalism as camps that are hopelessly dug in, the authors propose that the brain does do computation, but that it’s a very…

Biological computation and the nature of software

[wetwareontologies]

The latest on DNA computing - experts concur it can scale to 8-bit processing

Exciting research on the execution of biological computer processes, in-vivo.

The living animal which the molecular automata computed was a cockroach. The logic gates which were successfully executed in the animal were: AND, OR, XOR, NAND, NOT, CNOT and a half adder.

The team says it should be possible to scale up the computing power in the cockroach to that of an 8-bit computer, equivalent to a Commodore 64 or Atari 800 from the 1980s. Goni-Moreno agrees that this is feasible. "The mechanism seems easy to scale up so the complexity of the computations will soon become higher," he says.

[link]

[jackrusher]

Tom Knight now has a compiler in which you give a simple program to the system, and it compiles the program into a DNA strip. He then inserts that DNA string into the genome of E. coli, and it grows into a whole bunch of E. coli. When the RNA transcription mechanism encounters that piece of DNA it does a digital computation inside the living cell, connecting them to sensors and actuators. The sensors that he's used so far are sensing various lactone molecules. It can then send messages to these cells by putting a molecule in a solution with the cells. They, in turn, then do some computation. In the two outputs he's demonstrated so far they produce other lactone molecules which diffuse across the cell membrane, and maybe go to a different species of E. coli that he has in the same batch with a different program running in them. He also stole a luminescent chain from a Japanese jellyfish, so he can make these cells light up with one big answer—1 or 0—depending on the results of the computation.

Rod Brooks