I wonder if the headline was even written by the author rather than some copy editor. It doesn't seem to match the article which is quite interesting on how computation is being used in biological research. "Biology Will Be the Next Great Conputing Platform" is kind of silly.
Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
21–30 of 73 posts
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#22As 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…
Forgive me, but did your message not spring from a biological computing device which is arguably the most marvellous material object to exist in the known universe?
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#23As 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 pounds of SoC silicon dies, then grow them into an army of elephant sized drones. They faithfully execute commands with the precision of robots, yet require no maintenance or consumables, living off the land with self-healing capacity.
I believe the idea is not using DNA for general purpose programming as much as controlling biological systems using the paradigms of the software world.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#24Occasionally I see posts, for example on reddit but also discussions here, about what other programming languages a programmer could learn as the next (and higher) step in ones ongoing education. My suggestion for what to do after the CS degree, a road I took myself during the last few years, is to go to edX (or Khan Academy for any missing basics) and at the very least take MITs "Introduction to Biology", which actu…
IMHO these courses only scratch the surface, good to learn a thing or two, without much applicability. I am right now searching for a degree path in Biochemistry or Molecular Biology online. I want to spend time on it, but be able to actually apply my knowledge. There are so few of them (maybe because of the lab classes, idk). I've found online degrees in ASU ( https://asuonline.asu.edu/online-degree-programs/undergr…
Do you by any chance did come across an online course for biochemistry or something similiar? I've wanted now for quite some time to study biology and change my career in that direction, but no relevant degree seems to be designed for remote study.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#25Huh? I thought it’s been the computing platform for roughly the past billion years.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#26Synthego 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?..
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No, they don't solve problems, Of course they do. Being alive presents all kinds of problems. I mean, seriously man... I don't understand the things you write, really strange stuff, I'm at a loss.
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.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#28This 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.
> This is analog computers all over again. No it is not. Analog computers were used before good digital computers could be produced, for the same roles and straightforward problems. Life solves problem at scales that you cannot even touch with "precision" and in completely different ways. The problem is thinking that those systems are supposed to be used instead of computers. I reality, they are to tackle much differ…
> No it is not. Analog computers were used before good digital computers could be produced, for the same roles and straightforward problems.
Actually, analogue computing was still widely used for simulation and the like in many industries well into the 70s and 80s. Though often augmented with digital computers, for various purposes (simulation series, automated recording/reporting etc.)
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#29This 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 all over again
Biological coding is quite digital/discrete in its nature, from genes up, that's why it scales and has things like error correction. You can get all the precision you need if you get EC and statistics right. Now that will be the biggest challenge. (And getting statistics right is essential even for something like a modern CPU that always has at least a few broken transistors in it but still works.)
What we see as "individual organisms" at the large scale are analog in their functions, but this is an illusion. The actual units of information or transmissible programs are nothing but digital.
Life likes discrete/digital building blocks for complex machines for the same reasons we humans like them in our technology, nothing special here...
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#30As 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…
Forgive me, but did your message not spring from a biological computing device which is arguably the most marvellous material object to exist in the known universe?
Not exactly human made.
Also I suspect the article is wrong and we'll be outclassed by AI.