Please fix Conputing.
Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
41–50 of 73 posts
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Biological AI?
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#43As 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 th…
> But what if there was a way to write algorithms that can't be expressed with a von Neumann architecture?
There almost certainly isn’t, due to the universality of computation (see the Church–Turing hypothesis). At any rate, even if this hypothesis turns out to be false (almost unthinkable), DNA won’t offer anything beyond what classical von Neumann architecture offers.
> Do you think someday that biological computing could perform useful computations?
Potentially: proteins are a good potential starting material to build nanomachines. However, this has got nothing to do with this article. As the initial comment said, the article is completely unrelated to biological computing platforms, the title is pure clickbait.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#44As 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...
The article is fine. The editor (who provided the title) is the one without a clue.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.)
I think "70s and 80s" is well within the definition of "before good digital computers could be produced" in the context of many industries. You guys aren't disagreeing.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#46Synthego 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.
Do you mean the effect of the actual gene knockout, crispr specificity or off-spot mutations?
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#47This 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…
> Analog computers were just digital computers with a different computational paradigm.
No, there are fundamental differences. Digital computation is inherently error correcting because there are only two states — on or off. With analog computing, errors compound over long times and there’s fundamentally no way to fix this (it’s not just “hard”, it’s theoretically impossible). That’s why analog computation is fundamentally limited in scale, it can’t handle complexity through abstraction. Modern computer science is fundamentally tied to digital computation. This is also why evolution relies on a digital (albeit not binary) storage medium (DNA), and if we every have useful biological computation, it will likewise be digital.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#48I 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.
> I wonder if the headline was even written by the author rather than some copy editor
Almost certainly not, and they rarely are.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't interfere with any other part of the genome... That's a hard compute problem.
Do you mean the effect of the actual gene knockout, crispr specificity or off-spot mutations?
CRISPR specificity. Designing good gRNAs isn’t quite trivial, although it’s not as hard as the article makes it seem. I’m not sure about the claim of reducing the time of experiments by “month”.
Re: Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
#50Is 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
This is one of the main subfields of bioinformatics.