Zitat:
DNA forms building block for next breed of computer
By Jonathan Sidener
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
September 1, 2003
A snip...
"You can't compare and say a DNA computer is or isn't faster than this," Keinan said, gesturing toward a sleek, metallic Macintosh PowerBook in his Scripps office. "It's a different type of computer."
DNA computers don't have keyboards and monitors. The computing takes place on the laboratory bench as complex molecular-chemical reactions.
The first calculations, nearly 10 years ago, took place inside beakers and test tubes.
A new generation of DNA computing uses biochips, devices built using semiconductor manufacturing technology. A biochip has millions of pieces of DNA on its surface instead of the millions of electronic circuits on a computer chip.
At the moment, DNA computers are laboratory curiosities. One computer can play a respectable game of tick-tack-toe. Another can solve chess riddles. The computations they handle would make the least powerful of today's computers yawn.
But DNA computers show some intriguing qualities.
DNA is extremely efficient, both in storing data and in its use of energy. One gram of DNA, which would take up about as much space as an ice cube, can hold as much information as 1 trillion compact discs.
With today's computer chips, energy consumption and the heat produced as a byproduct can cause malfunctions. But the chemical reactions that make a DNA computer work require little energy.
Most significantly, the biomolecular computers operate on different underlying principles.
Electronic computers make their calculations by processing a series of zeroes and ones, or binary code, one character at a time in a rapid sequence, like a machine gun that fires a series of bullets from a single barrel in succession.
Not so with DNA computers. Because millions of DNA snippets can fit into a drop of water, DNA computers can make many parallel calculations at once, more comparable to a shrapnel grenade that launches many projectiles at the same instant.
To Keinan and other researchers, this parallel processing provides much of the allure of DNA computing, the idea that machines built with a fundamentally different computing engine will be able to tackle fundamentally different questions.
Interessant finde ich, dass ein Gramm DNA so viel Platz benötigt, wie ein Eiswürfel.