Author Topic: Organic Computers  (Read 3624 times)

Offline Houshalter

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Organic Computers
« on: May 08, 2010, 11:22:29 PM »
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.

Offline Billy

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Organic Computers
« Reply #1 on: May 09, 2010, 05:30:27 AM »
I do not see how anything this complex would work within about two million years. And even then, conventional microprocessors would probably be more efficient. The bacteria would have to learn to organize itself into an organism for one thing. A very complex one. I can't see how an organic transistor would work either. By the way, that would be selective breeding, not evolution.  
"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars."

-Charles Darwin

Offline Houshalter

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Organic Computers
« Reply #2 on: May 09, 2010, 09:17:45 AM »
Selective breeding is evolution if you think about it. And your right, bacteria are not good canidates. Its probably wise to choose something that already has multicellular abilities. Protists maybe? Work is already being done on genetically engineering bacteria to form computers, all I'm suggesting is that you use evolution instead.

Heres the wiki page about Bio computing.
The wiki page on DNA computing.

I found this interesting:
Quote
This field was initially developed by Leonard Adleman of the University of Southern California, in 1994.[1] Adleman demonstrated a proof-of-concept use of DNA as a form of computation which solved the seven-point Hamiltonian path problem. Since the initial Adleman experiments, advances have been made and various Turing machines have been proven to be constructible.

In 2002, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, unveiled a programmable molecular computing machine composed of enzymes and DNA molecules instead of silicon microchips.[4] On April 28, 2004, Ehud Shapiro, Yaakov Benenson, Binyamin Gil, Uri Ben-Dor, and Rivka Adar at the Weizmann Institute announced in the journal Nature that they had constructed a DNA computer coupled with an input and output module which would theoretically be capable of diagnosing cancerous activity within a cell, and releasing an anti-cancer drug upon diagnosis.

In 2009, biocomputing systems were coupled with standard silicon based chips for the first time. In this experiment, an enzyme based OR-Reset/AND-Reset logic system was achieved using field-effect Silicon chips. This advancement could yield great potential in the fields of Synthetic Biology, and Biomedical Engineering, as it marks the integration of biological and electro-mechanical systems on a sub-cellular level.


Quote
For certain specialized problems, DNA computers are faster and smaller than any other computer built so far. Furthermore, particular mathematical computations have been demonstrated to work on a DNA computer. As an example, Aran Nayebi has provided a general scalable implementation of Strassen's matrix multiplication algorithm on a DNA computer.
« Last Edit: May 09, 2010, 09:18:16 AM by Houshalter »

Offline Billy

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Organic Computers
« Reply #3 on: May 09, 2010, 09:35:36 AM »
I already know about DNA computing, but that is far from the same thing. As far as I'm aware, the DNA isn't within cells when it does the computations.
"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars."

-Charles Darwin