Biological computers are currently the most adaptable computers in existence. Easily programmed and yet flexible enough to bring our society to the peaks it has achieved. Personally, I think 1999 was the peak of our society because, except for minor advances in certain areas, we seem to be going backwards.
There have been several attempts at making biological computers using slivers of mouse brain and so on all with some measure of success and lately scientists engineered e-coli, our famous stomach bug, to solve a puzzle. Isn’t science great. Next time you have a stomach bug you can get its help solving puzzles while laid up. That is progress.
Anyway, now it appears that they were using the same technique to perform the Hamiltonian Path Problem, basically routing between nodes, which it appears to have handled correctly. Personally, I’m a bit concerned about teaching something that makes us ill best routes around a network but that is just me.
I’m not clear in my own mind how easy these biological computers are going to be to program but I can certainly see how they can help us if they can handle routing issues. Traffic management for one. However, current computers can do the same things. Their speed is such that there is little benefit of replacing them with biological computers for our more mundane tasks at this point. It will be in the areas of thinking outside the box, linking apparently disparate facts and formulating theories that biological computers will come into their own. Thinking just like we do and not the on rails mechanical thinking that computers do so well.
That is a long way off but when it gets here we will enter the dawn of a new processing age. The sky will then be the limit. In the meantime of course computer technology continues to improve in speed. I wonder if we will have a computer brain comparable with our own before we develop a fully working biological brain.
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. — Epictetus (c.55-c.135)
Biological computers
Biological computers are currently the most adaptable computers in existence. Easily programmed and yet flexible enough to bring our society to the peaks it has achieved. Personally, I think 1999 was the peak of our society because, except for minor advances in certain areas, we seem to be going backwards.
There have been several attempts at making biological computers using slivers of mouse brain and so on all with some measure of success and lately scientists engineered e-coli, our famous stomach bug, to solve a puzzle. Isn’t science great. Next time you have a stomach bug you can get its help solving puzzles while laid up. That is progress.
Anyway, now it appears that they were using the same technique to perform the Hamiltonian Path Problem, basically routing between nodes, which it appears to have handled correctly. Personally, I’m a bit concerned about teaching something that makes us ill best routes around a network but that is just me.
I’m not clear in my own mind how easy these biological computers are going to be to program but I can certainly see how they can help us if they can handle routing issues. Traffic management for one. However, current computers can do the same things. Their speed is such that there is little benefit of replacing them with biological computers for our more mundane tasks at this point. It will be in the areas of thinking outside the box, linking apparently disparate facts and formulating theories that biological computers will come into their own. Thinking just like we do and not the on rails mechanical thinking that computers do so well.
That is a long way off but when it gets here we will enter the dawn of a new processing age. The sky will then be the limit. In the meantime of course computer technology continues to improve in speed. I wonder if we will have a computer brain comparable with our own before we develop a fully working biological brain.