* CoMputing (typo in the title)
Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#32As someone who has a PhD in biochemistry and has been coding since age 5, I find the headline rediculous. You won't be computing in biology. Consider, a transistor is about 50-100 atoms wide. A protein, which cannot itself even be a minimal unit of compute, (maybe a molecular transistor like NiFe hydrogenase has a shot) is already bigger than that. The things described in the article are not biology used for computat…
I remember seeing my first article about biology as a computing substrate when I was a kid and thinking OH MY GOD...and then nothing happened for 100 years. (I am very old.)
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#33Is there any project or discipline aiming to model our biology in software so that we can simulate things on a computer?
(Edit) I found this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelling_biological_systems
I guess that is it
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#34As someone who has a PhD in biochemistry and has been coding since age 5, I find the headline rediculous. You won't be computing in biology. Consider, a transistor is about 50-100 atoms wide. A protein, which cannot itself even be a minimal unit of compute, (maybe a molecular transistor like NiFe hydrogenase has a shot) is already bigger than that. The things described in the article are not biology used for computat…
The whole article is a fine demonstration of what happens when a Silicon Valley journalist writes a piece on biology without an inkling of what it's all about...
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#35As someone who has a PhD in biochemistry and has been coding since age 5, I find the headline rediculous. You won't be computing in biology. Consider, a transistor is about 50-100 atoms wide. A protein, which cannot itself even be a minimal unit of compute, (maybe a molecular transistor like NiFe hydrogenase has a shot) is already bigger than that. The things described in the article are not biology used for computat…
Clickbait aside, I think there are vast possibilities for DNA to be used as a fabrication tool. Imagine a seed you could plant and it would rapidly grow in the shape of a house, using nothing but sunlight, atmospheric CO2 and a bit of fertilizer. Also, by controlling the expression of biological features you could create bioelectronic hybrids that leverage the best of both worlds. Imagine you ship to Mars a few pound…
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Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Life didn't start out because it had the problem of not being a thing. Can it still be considered "problem-solving" when the so-called "problems" are only so in the context of animal survival and breeding from the perspective of animal consciousness? Life just randomly grows and takes on random shapes, it's not a force of problem-solving.
Yet, here we are, solving problems.
You are not life, you are a human, a lifeform - product of life.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#37As someone who has a PhD in biochemistry and has been coding since age 5, I find the headline rediculous. You won't be computing in biology. Consider, a transistor is about 50-100 atoms wide. A protein, which cannot itself even be a minimal unit of compute, (maybe a molecular transistor like NiFe hydrogenase has a shot) is already bigger than that. The things described in the article are not biology used for computat…
"As someone who has a PhD in biochemistry and has been coding since age 5, I find the headline rediculous. You won't be computing in biology.... principles from CS applied to biology which has some validity."
I think it may be worth reminding people that modern-day computing is only a subset of computation, and not even necessarily a very large one. Computing with biology has extremely different characteristics from computing with modern computers, and the field of Software Engineering may not have much to say about it except in the vaguest of terms, but Computer Science may still have quite a lot to say about the limits of computation on this new substrate, how to do error correction, and all sorts of other things.
A computational formalism can easily be applied to something like an anti-body, and of course, anything larger than that. The primary thing that stops us is the fact that we have such a poor picture of what is going on that we don't have the data to create the formalisms correctly, nor machines (biological or otherwise) to manipulate such formalisms. But that's a human limitation and in some sense an engineering limitation, not a limitation of Computer Science.
Whatever we are coding in biology will be radically, radically different. Entire classes of squabbles in our industry become irrelevant; you won't get a concurrency choice (it's just "yes, all the time and everywhere"), there will be no meaningful debate over mutability (again, "yes all the time and everywhere"), "structured programming" is just meaningless since the entire concept of "scope" will be out the window. I don't know what it will look like. But I do know that whatever it is, quite a bit of Computer Science will still apply to it. Biological computing will not be immune to information theory. It won't be immune to complexity theory, although a whole new suite of classes will probably have to arise, and there will be a lot more probability in it (but recall that complexity theory already extensively uses that, so it's not like that's a new thing). And even software engineering won't be entirely tossed out... for instance, "leaky abstractions" will be an even bigger problem than they are for us now.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#38This is analog computers all over again. It suffers the same problems, namely lower reliability and a lack of precision. I don't see how this will stack up to the millions of man-years humanity has invested into silicon based computers.
Analog computers were just digital computers with a different computational paradigm. That is, they had the same IO mechanisms, just how the Input became Output was slightly tweaked.
Biological computing will be interesting primarily because it will be able to build things, which neither analog nor digital computers are particularly good at. It's an entirely different paradigm. The act of computation can also be the output.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#39Synthego custom crispr kit seems like a very useless service. Guide RNA design for knockout is extremely trivial. You just need a couple of 20bp+NGG sequence which is unique to the gene.. Who would pay to do that?..
That doesn't interfere with any other part of the genome... That's a hard compute problem.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#40As someone who has a PhD in biochemistry and has been coding since age 5, I find the headline rediculous. You won't be computing in biology. Consider, a transistor is about 50-100 atoms wide. A protein, which cannot itself even be a minimal unit of compute, (maybe a molecular transistor like NiFe hydrogenase has a shot) is already bigger than that. The things described in the article are not biology used for computat…
But what if there was a way to write algorithms that can't be expressed with a von Neumann architecture?
Do you know where I can read about what categories of biocomputation there are? Is there a biological Turing machine that's ever been built, or no, I guess it'd be grown?
As another commenter said, computation is a more vast category than the simplicity of one instruction and then another instruction. Fantastic things can be computed, but most of them are difficult with modern computers.
Parallelization in a biocomputer would also be an important advancement. Like how early computers were room--sized, I can imagine a room full of intricate, strange plants all arriving at their results. That's a lot cheaper too, presumably, then a bunch of GPUs on a rack. Even if it's more expensive, the category of computing it could do might make it still worth it anyways.
Do you think someday that biological computing could perform useful computations?
I'm sure you're busy with important work, you don't have to answer these. I'm sure your knowledge is immense, so your time is precious! Thanks for your comment!