Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law • Hacker News Board

Re: Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law

#21

Post by keeperofdakeys » Sun, Jul 13, 2014, 4:23 AM UTC

tedsanders wrote: post #9

tempestn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. Still, the 1.5nm scale they mention is significantly smaller than anything we have now. Is it conceivable that we will see a whole new type of electronics on a subatomic scale in the future though? (Where the structure of a chip is not even made out of atoms, but entirely of subatomic particles?) I actually have an electrical engineering degree, but the couple of materials courses I took back in the early…

It's hard to rule anything out, but I think using non-atomic matter would be very difficult for a few reasons. (1) Subatomic particles are not necessarily smaller than atoms. Even though in the particle sense, an electron is infinitely small, in the wave sense, an electron can extend over a volume much larger than a single atom. So it's not necessarily the case that a subatomic particle like an electron is smaller th…

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/optical-circuits-s... There has been some (very early) work done with photon transistors. One of its cool applications will be fibre-optic hardware, to achieve much lower processing latency, hence faster data transit.

Re: Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law

#22

Post by Houshalter » Sun, Jul 13, 2014, 5:46 AM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #15

Houshalter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution isn't likely to happen in self-replicating robots. Evolution needs a continuous fitness landscape like DNA. A random bitflip is more likely to produce a fatal error than do something beneficial. Even worse if the code is encrypted before copying. There also aren't that many generations. At exponential growth, it only takes a few dozen generations to reach the maximum population limit and stop replicating. N…

That last sentence is rather odd, coming from a gigantic lump of some trillions of cooperating cells.

Multicelluar organisms exist but they aren't "fluid" like I described. It's not like animals will spontaneously combine into a single organism. Some plants can sort of do this, like bamboo forests. But they don't have a lot of specialization like animals do, with different organs and stuff.

Re: Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law

#23

Post by todayiamme » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 6:48 PM UTC

DerpDerpDerp wrote: post #13

todayiamme wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally, we already have self-replicating robots with nano-level structures that consume materials from their surroundings and build new copies. They're called bacteria. The interesting bit over here is not the observation, but the question why we aren't all covered in bacterial goo miles thick like run-away nano-technology. (we do have them all around us and in us for what its worth) I think a part of the answ…

Your analysis ignores the key point that bacteria operate on simple rules based entirely on local concerns, which is not the proposed case in the sci-fi story.

So you're saying that top-down management or even peer-to-peer management will exist within the grey goo scenario? I'm somewhat skeptical about top-down management, as there would be enough nano-bots within a 1cm deep layer in a city the size of NYC to far outstrip the attempts of a complex entity to control them coherently. As far as peer-to-peer communication goes, then bacteria are already doing this; http://www.hhmi.org/research/cell-cell-communication-bacteri... and they still haven't covered us in grey goo.