Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13232-z

by hardmaru • 7 years ago

52 24 7 years ago

dnautics5• 7 years ago

As someone who spent 10 years at the forefront of synthetic biology (and has programmed for 30+ years) I always found the biocomputing baffling. I would be willing to bet against Cellular Supremacy over any time frame, except evolutionary or geologic timeframes.

api6• 7 years ago

Your brain consumes about 40 watts and you wrote that sentence.

dnautics5• 7 years ago

why do you assume that writing that sentence was computationally hard?

hirundo• 7 years ago

Useful evolutionary timeframes are days to months when the substrate reproduces in hours or minutes. Just a few generations can produce very significant adaptations via massive parallelism.

text70• 7 years ago

The only way I could see it having any relative application would be improved finite control of magnetic fields around metallocene or porphyrin cores, through engineered photo-reactive protein shells.

ArtWomb• 7 years ago

It appears that "Supremacy" isn't going away ;)

Overall, a very enjoyable read. As long as we are speculating on the limits of bio-based computatbility, The same physical constraints governing inanimate systems would of course apply to biochemical reactive systems.

What biologic does buy you is reproduction. An proclivity to seed machines over a wide geographic or cosmic area that is self-propelling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation

Rexxar• 7 years ago

This way to name things give me the impression that science is not any more about advancing knowledge but about to find the most grandiloquent way to speak about your work. All this "quantum supremacy" and now "cellular supremacy" seems really disturbing.

As they propose the term in this article, I hope that someone will found a better name. It's an interesting subject and it deserve a better name.

Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing

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