Comment by jrq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrq | Hacker News Reader

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But what if there was a way to write algorithms that can't be expressed with a von Neumann architecture?

Do you know where I can read about what categories of biocomputation there are? Is there a biological Turing machine that's ever been built, or no, I guess it'd be grown?

As another commenter said, computation is a more vast category than the simplicity of one instruction and then another instruction. Fantastic things can be computed, but most of them are difficult with modern computers.

Parallelization in a biocomputer would also be an important advancement. Like how early computers were room--sized, I can imagine a room full of intricate, strange plants all arriving at their results. That's a lot cheaper too, presumably, then a bunch of GPUs on a rack. Even if it's more expensive, the category of computing it could do might make it still worth it anyways.

Do you think someday that biological computing could perform useful computations?

I'm sure you're busy with important work, you don't have to answer these. I'm sure your knowledge is immense, so your time is precious! Thanks for your comment!

> But what if there was a way to write algorithms that can't be expressed with a von Neumann architecture?

There almost certainly isn’t, due to the universality of computation (see the Church–Turing hypothesis). At any rate, even if this hypothesis turns out to be false (almost unthinkable), DNA won’t offer anything beyond what classical von Neumann architecture offers.

> Do you think someday that biological computing could perform useful computations?

Potentially: proteins are a good potential starting material to build nanomachines. However, this has got nothing to do with this article. As the initial comment said, the article is completely unrelated to biological computing platforms, the title is pure clickbait.

I know it was off the track of the article, I was gravitating to the more interesting idea.

Thanks for your time!

I can't answer you directly but perhaps this helps too.

I recently finished Summa Technologiae from Stanislaw Lem which does investigate a lot of these questions in many of its chapters.

I highly recommend it as it is a detailed, vivid exploration written by a very wise person so much so that it is easy to forget while reading that the book was published more than 50 years ago.

But there's also a practical reason why you might be interested in it even if you wouldn't think anything of a personal(?) recommendation from someone on the internet.

It is based on a lot of academic papers Lem read from all sorts of fields, which are all referenced (at least they were in the version I've read), so it should be easy to then start to look for more recent papers based on those.

I found it online, looks fascinating! Thanks so much!

That's the best kind of book to read, the kind someone wrote after reading a bunch of other books.

http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/

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