Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing
#2As someone who spent 10 years at the forefront of synthetic biology (and has programmed for 30+ years) I always found the biocomputing baffling. I would be willing to bet against Cellular Supremacy over any time frame, except evolutionary or geologic timeframes.
Re: Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing
#3It appears that "Supremacy" isn't going away ;)
Overall, a very enjoyable read. As long as we are speculating on the limits of bio-based computatbility, The same physical constraints governing inanimate systems would of course apply to biochemical reactive systems.
What biologic does buy you is reproduction. An proclivity to seed machines over a wide geographic or cosmic area that is self-propelling.
Re: Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing
#4This way to name things give me the impression that science is not any more about advancing knowledge but about to find the most grandiloquent way to speak about your work. All this "quantum supremacy" and now "cellular supremacy" seems really disturbing.
As they propose the term in this article, I hope that someone will found a better name. It's an interesting subject and it deserve a better name.
Re: Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing
#5As someone who spent 10 years at the forefront of synthetic biology (and has programmed for 30+ years) I always found the biocomputing baffling. I would be willing to bet against Cellular Supremacy over any time frame, except evolutionary or geologic timeframes.
Your brain consumes about 40 watts and you wrote that sentence.
Re: Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing
#6As someone who spent 10 years at the forefront of synthetic biology (and has programmed for 30+ years) I always found the biocomputing baffling. I would be willing to bet against Cellular Supremacy over any time frame, except evolutionary or geologic timeframes.
Your brain consumes about 40 watts and you wrote that sentence.
why do you assume that writing that sentence was computationally hard?
Re: Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your brain consumes about 40 watts and you wrote that sentence.
why do you assume that writing that sentence was computationally hard?
the closest computational equivalent to writing that sentence we have today involves executing a model with 1.5 billion parameters. (and I couldn't find an estimate of the energy cost of that)
Re: Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing
#8As someone who spent 10 years at the forefront of synthetic biology (and has programmed for 30+ years) I always found the biocomputing baffling. I would be willing to bet against Cellular Supremacy over any time frame, except evolutionary or geologic timeframes.
Useful evolutionary timeframes are days to months when the substrate reproduces in hours or minutes. Just a few generations can produce very significant adaptations via massive parallelism.
Re: Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
why do you assume that writing that sentence was computationally hard?
the closest computational equivalent to writing that sentence we have today involves executing a model with 1.5 billion parameters. (and I couldn't find an estimate of the energy cost of that)
It's many orders of magnitude larger than 40 watts * 5 seconds. :)
I have a running bet with some friends that one of the following is true:
(1) The brain is somehow leveraging quantum computing to achieve polynomial or square root acceleration on combinatorial search and optimization problems.
(2) P=NP and there exist polynomial time classical algorithms for these problems.
(3) The naturalistic hypothesis fails and intelligence is somehow "supernatural" and does things that cannot be described or modeled within the confines of physical space-time.
I cannot think of any alternative that can possibly explain how the brain can do what it does on ~40 watts. Everything we have learned to date argues that intelligence and cognition involves a whole lot of massive combinatorial problems that can't possibly be performed classically on so little power.
Re: Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
the closest computational equivalent to writing that sentence we have today involves executing a model with 1.5 billion parameters. (and I couldn't find an estimate of the energy cost of that)
It's many orders of magnitude larger than 40 watts * 5 seconds. :) I have a running bet with some friends that one of the following is true: (1) The brain is somehow leveraging quantum computing to achieve polynomial or square root acceleration on combinatorial search and optimization problems. (2) P=NP and there exist polynomial time classical algorithms for these problems. (3) The naturalistic hypothesis fails and…
The brain is not a von-neumann architecture.
We have different architectures that can perform computation million times more efficiently than general computers. Of course, they lose on other axes (like precision).
Whats 54398456905 * 23423645745? Your 40 W brain can't compute that in a minute, yet a 0.01 W calculator can in a millisecond.