This idea always fasinated me, but I think I have a plausible way to actually use evolution in a practical way. Allright, so the idea goes that organisms like bacteria are thousands of times more complex then an average computer. They can store terrabytes in single, short molecules, they can form extremely complex networks, etc. There was an expiriment a while back where they used a bunch of mouse neurons to power a robot. But thats not what I mean. I mean that it might be possible to evolve an organism that could do rudimentary computational tasks, and could be put with thousands of other organisms like it to create efficient biological computers if you will. How would you do that you ask? Well I'm not quite sure, but my idea is that you choose a canidate organism that looks like it could evolve the ability your looking for. Then you let it multiply. It can be stored in a small area like a film canister, or even smaller probably. The idea is to a) create a large population base to start the expirement with, select for the fastest reproducing ones, and c)select for the ones that survive/reproduce best under the lab conditions you have provided. The faster they reproduce, the faster the expiriment will go, the better, so this is somewhat important. I immagine this would have to be pretty large scale to have any chance of success, so maybe a giant warehouse full of thousands of these containers breeding the organism. Since its impractical to have hundreds of scientists going down each aisle and testing each one manually, a machine or robot would have to do it which isn't that far fetched an idea, although it might be a little expensive to obtain one. Then you advance evolution in stages. The first stage you do what I already said, select for quick reproducion and build a large population base. The second stage you slowly introduce an electric current into the enviroment and create a tolerance, maybe even adaptions to use the current to its advantage. Then you select for efficiently using the current, picking the ones that let the current flow through the container the best. Now you have an organism that is adpated to elecricity somewhat. From here you diverge into evolve seperate componets of the computers, mabe one at a time or dividing resources to do multiple ones. I don't know much about electronics, but I think you would start selecting for properties of basic computer components. Logic gates, transistors, capacitors, retaining electric charges or some kind of chemical memory, pulsing behaviors, etc. I know that other expirements had success in evolving bacteria such as in nylonasse bacteria or E. coli, abiet those took a long time to get results. The advantage here is that your breeding it in masses and in a more industrial way, not as an expiriment. If you could "grow" a computer, then you could push the cost of
GFLOPS way down.
How does this relate to Darwinbots? I don't know, I guess it involves evolution and computers, plus if it worked we could run DB on it.