Scientists successfully test ‘biological supercomputer’ performing complex tasks | Hacker News Reader

Scientists successfully test ‘biological supercomputer’ performing complex tasks

rt.com

70 pointsjonbaer26 comments

How is this built exactly? In a petri-dish?

No, in a flow cell.

do you have a link describing a flow cell?

http://www.biofilms.biz/flow-cells

basically they are little chambers with in ports and out ports with environmental control (temp, pressure). You shove stuff in, let it react, then flow it back out.

Gives you control over concentrations. The flow cell is transparent so you can put it in a microscope and analyze the reactions. In this case it looks like they used beam lithography to create a surface inside the flow cell.

If anyone wants it, here's a pdf of the original study. https://my.mixtape.moe/lymbwb.pdf

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11195344

"There are worlds and worlds and worlds, an infinity you cannot grasp. You could travel from one to another to another and find me in thousands upon thousands, spreading like stars in the sky from reality to reality. They invite me in. They give birth to me. And soon, yours will do the same, men are working tirelessly toward it. They bring me into their world because they always want what only I can give. In this place, seven billion men bear my mark. And of the limitless infinity of worlds, I rule over almost half of them." -- Korrok, from "John Dies at the End"

"I serve none but Korrok" should be the new "I for one welcome our robot overlords" :)

I just looked up that book, and it seems so trippy. Do you recommend reading it?

It's one of my favourite horror novels. It's really good fun if you're into that kind of thing.

I absolutely loved it. Yes, I highly recommend it :)

Its pretty funny. And the movie is solid too.

If I purchase a biological supercomputer, how long does it take for normal cell death to render it ineffective? Humans have a planned obsolescence of around 80 years but a (large) dog only lives for about 10 years. I guess in some ways this is no different from electronics manufacturers gluing their computers/tablets/phones together (or building them with non-replaceable batteries) but I'm opposed to that trend as well.

So what does this "supercomputer" mean in context of RT.com?

> The model is so far designed to tackle only one specific problem, but that is enough to set the groundwork for further research, and, according to Nicolau, biocomputers are coming our way fast.

I think they mean a computer with high-level computational capacity, even though it is hard to see that this become reality within few years. It would be really cool to make it happen though.

It means that it is capable of computing 1,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.

When I hear "biocomputer", here's what I think: I am a programmer in the near future, and I need to feed my computers daily, and change their water weekly. This is just to maintain a minimal amount of performance. But I'm awful at this: I have killed many fish before in my life purely by not being attentive enough. I would almost certainly accidentally murder my biocomputers. And the smell!

For careless people like you , you will be able to rent computers from the cloud (well, the lake or the river, maybe from the actual Amazon river).

Viruses may become a serious problem both kind. In the future you might need to get medicine for your computer :)

Flu shot too :D

Rabbit, flu shot, someone talk to me!

cookie cookie cookie cookie cookie cookie

I'll head 'em off at the pass.

The ship's computer in Star Trek: Voyager was biological, with bags of neural tissue networked together. There's an episode where the ship literally gets sick along with the crew: it's what I thought of immediately after reading the headline.

Biology has been used for NP-hard before. Travelling Salesman was run in a petri dish maybe 20 years ago IIRC. Answer was encoded in RNA fragment concentrations.IIRC again) the base sequence was the solution.

do not post any news from this criminal news network. russia is killing people in Ukraine and then try to look otherwise using this network as a primary tool!

The same thing could be said about US news sources.

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