Swerve1000
07-06-2007, 09:47 PM
Been reading a book called Genesis Machine - The new science of Biocomputing by Martyn Amos and it's been fascinating.
It's telling the story of how DNA is being used to develop the first logic gate based 'transistors'. Its starts by telling how advances are made in silicon based chips and how the increases we are currently seeing in speed and density won't continue for ever and there is a point at which no further increases could be made in silicon based chips due to how they manufacturer the chips, the thinner separations are limited and the effect of heat.
Apparently to increase speed and density the lines made between each onboard transistor on a chip are made thinner and thinner but once at a certain level, it cannot be made thinner due to the heat which increases causes the atoms to bounce around to such an extent that they will cross over into another transistor causing errors, this is why the cooling systems on CPU's used are getting bigger and bigger on chips.
Scientists are now able to take stands of DNA and manipulate them to act in basic logic gate 1 or 0 states, they have created a rabbit which has had jellyfish genes inserted, and this rabbit when shone under UV light flashes blue, on-off-on-off as the gene goes form 1 to 0, to 1 and so on.
Also it has said that the mathematical theory of P=NP ( www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_classes_P_and_NP ) is what all SHTTP encryption is based on, this formula has never been proven as being true and should a mathematician ever prove it to be correct, then all online encryption could be cracked, kinda like the box in the film Sneakers.
The parallel processing powers of bio-chips would exceed sequential based silicon based chip processing by a thousand times and be minutely small.
The books a bitover my head, especially as I hate maths, but reading this book has given me some idea of the potential scale of how powerful these bio-machines may prove to be.
It's telling the story of how DNA is being used to develop the first logic gate based 'transistors'. Its starts by telling how advances are made in silicon based chips and how the increases we are currently seeing in speed and density won't continue for ever and there is a point at which no further increases could be made in silicon based chips due to how they manufacturer the chips, the thinner separations are limited and the effect of heat.
Apparently to increase speed and density the lines made between each onboard transistor on a chip are made thinner and thinner but once at a certain level, it cannot be made thinner due to the heat which increases causes the atoms to bounce around to such an extent that they will cross over into another transistor causing errors, this is why the cooling systems on CPU's used are getting bigger and bigger on chips.
Scientists are now able to take stands of DNA and manipulate them to act in basic logic gate 1 or 0 states, they have created a rabbit which has had jellyfish genes inserted, and this rabbit when shone under UV light flashes blue, on-off-on-off as the gene goes form 1 to 0, to 1 and so on.
Also it has said that the mathematical theory of P=NP ( www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_classes_P_and_NP ) is what all SHTTP encryption is based on, this formula has never been proven as being true and should a mathematician ever prove it to be correct, then all online encryption could be cracked, kinda like the box in the film Sneakers.
The parallel processing powers of bio-chips would exceed sequential based silicon based chip processing by a thousand times and be minutely small.
The books a bitover my head, especially as I hate maths, but reading this book has given me some idea of the potential scale of how powerful these bio-machines may prove to be.
