Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

DNA computers? I think the answer is “we outclassed them”. At 10nm, transistors are about the size of 10 base-pairs at this point, but much faster and much less error prone.

View on HN

I think DNA has semiconductors beat on average information density though. A tube of DNA can contain a datacenter’s worth of information. Read times are abysmal and error rate is through the roof, but it’s relatively stable on the order of hundreds of years.

>stable on the order of hundreds of years

Just isn’t something in super high demand. That and density are probably the only major advantages right? And I don’t imagine the equipment to "read" that data will be very compact in the foreseeable future.

If the demand was high enough I bet there would already be profitable companies pursuing it. I do see it as a potential market though. It’s no fun having a cold storage archive that needs constant hardware replacements.

I would imagine reading would be done in a similar way as it is today: amplification and sequencing. Data would have to be given a hefty amount of data correction. There are no apparent show stoppers that I’m aware of, just not enough interest.

error rate is actually pretty low compared to HDD I believe

We're still not even close for energy efficiency though. I can't remember the exact figures, but for most tasks the Brain is much more efficient per joule than any CPU.

True, though I don’t think that’s a “DNA” computer in the same way that merely using semiconductors doesn’t makes my laptop a “quantum” computer.

Going with the Kuzweil estimate on Wikipedia, human brains are about 1e15 ops/Joule, whereas the best in the Green500 list (June 2019) is 1.76e10 ops/Joule.

This is true for things people have evolved to do, but a cell phone can do a lifetimes worth of arithmetic in less than a second using negligible energy relative 2000 calories per day for 70 years

Reply on news.ycombinator.com