Dave.Touretzky%CMU-CS-A@sri-unix.UUCP (11/01/83)
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Date: 31 Oct 1983 18:41 EST (Mon)
From: Daniel S. Weld <WELD%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA>
To: macmol%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
Subject: Molecular Computers
Below is a forwarded message:
From: David Rogers <DRogers at SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
I have always been confused by the people who work on
"molecular computers", it seems so stupid. It seems much
more reasonable to consider the reverse application: using
computers to make better molecules.
Is anyone out there excited by this stuff?
MOLECULAR COMPUTERS by Lee Dembart, LA Times
(reprinted from the San Jose Mercury News 31 Oct 83)
SANTA MONICA - Scientists have dreamed for the past few years of
building a radically different kind of computer, one based on
molecular reactions rather than on silicon.
With such a machine, they could pack circuits much more tightly than
they can inside today's computers. More important, a molecular
computer might not be bound by the rigid binary logic of conventional
computers.
Biological functions - the movement of information within a cell or
between cells - are the models for molecular computers. If that basic
process could be reproduced in a machine, it would be a very powerful
machine.
But such a machine is many, many years away. Some say the idea is
science fiction. At the moment, it exists only in the minds of of
several dozen computer scientists, biologists, chemists and engineers,
many of whom met here last week under the aegis of the Crump Institute
for Medical Engineering at the University of California at Los
Angeles.
"There are a number of ideas in place, a number of technologies in
place, but no concrete results," said Michael Conrad, a biologist and
computer scientist at Wayne State University in Detroit and a
co-organizer of the conference.
For all their strengths, today's digital computers have no ability to
judge. They cannot recognize patterns. They cannot, for example,
distinguish one face from another, as even babies can.
A great deal of information can be packed on a computer chip, but it
pales by comparison to the contents of the brain of an ant, which can
protect itself against its environment.
If scientists had a computer with more flexible logic and circuitry,
they think they might be able to develop "a different style of
computing", one less rigid than current computers, one that works more
like a brain and less like a machine. The "mood" of such a device
might affect the way scientists solve problems, just as people's moods
affect their work.
The computing molecules would be manufactured by genetically
engineered bacteria, which has given rise to the name "biochip" to
describe a network of them.
"This is really the new gene technology", Conrad said.
The conference was a meeting on the frontiers - some would say fringes
- of knowledge, and several times participants scoffed, saying that
the discussion was meandering into philosophy.
The meeting touched on some of the most fundamental questions of brain
and computer research, revealing how little is known of the mind's
mechanisms.
The goal of artificial intelligence work is to write programs that
simulate thought on digital computers. The meeting's goal was to think
about different kinds of computers that might do that better.
Among the questions posed at the conference:
- How do you get a computer to chuckle at a joke?
- What is the memory capacity of the brain? Is there a limit to that
capacity?
- Are there styles of problem solving that are not digitally
computable?
- Can computer science shed any light on the mechanisms of biological
science? Can computer science problems be addressed by biological
science mechanisms?
Proponents of molecular computers argue that it is possible to make
such a machine because biological systems perform those processes all
the time. Proponents of artificial intelligence have argued for years
that the existence of the brain is proof that it is possible to make a
small machine that thinks like a brain.
It is a powerful argument. Biological systems already exist that
compute information in a better way than digital computers do. "There
has got to be inspiration growing out of biology", said F. Eugene
Yates, the Crump Institutes director.
Bacteria use sophisticated chemical processes to transfer information.
Can that process be copied?
Enzymes work by stereoscopically matching their molecules with other
molecules, a decision-making process that occurs thousands of times a
second. It would take a binary computer weeks to make even one match.
"It's that failure to do a thing that an enzyme does 10,000 times a
second that makes us think there must be a better way," Yates said.
In the history of science, theoretical progress and technological
progress are intertwined. One makes the other possible. It is not
surprising, therefore, that thinking about molecular computers has
been spurred recently by advances in chemistry and biotechnology that
seem to provide both the materials needed and a means for producing it
on a commercial scale.
"If you could design such a reaction, you could probably get a
bacteria to make it," Yates said.
Conrad thinks that a functioning machine is 50 years away, and he
described it as a "futuristic" development.
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