I have been dealing with a fair amount of stress in my life, and have much more important things to do so therefore my brain suddenly came up with a very plausible method of constructing an entry-level nanocomputer with mostly available materials.
This posting is intended as food for thought because I am a hundred miles from actually being competent in any of the fields I'm going to be touching on. =P Molecular Manufacturing is either still a decade off or a closely guarded military secret. Who knows which... However, a computational architecture does seem feasible using existing techniques. A computer is a machine defined not by it's structure, but by the information it contains. Therefore the physical structure of a computer can be extremely simple. http://www.flickriver.com/photos/alteracorp/3637042466/ Basically, a simple repeating pattern of nodes should be completely sufficient. A functional machine would effectively operate on FPGA or CAM principles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_crystallization So basically what you need is an amino acid sequence, or a sequence of any type of polymer actually, that will --> fold into a cubic or nearly cubic shape. --> Exhibit exploitable, programmable computational properties at some reasonable temperature. The hypothesis is that such a chain of molecules exists. There are several mechanical basises which it might operate, in approximate order of increasing desirability: --> rod/gear logic. --> electronics --> "spintronics" --> photonics. --> quantum entanglement. To start with, you would only want maybe ten microns cubed to prove your concept so bulk fabrication shouldn't be a prohibitive roadblock, at first at least. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_synthesis Eventually you'd want to scale up to a brick the size of a good old full-height drive bay. (a typical desktop CD-rom drive is a half-height device). Obviously, nailing down a computationally useful crystal shape is going to be challenging. To use it, you're going to need to power it, communicate with it, and cool it. For a micro-volume, the latter probably won't come up but at brick size, hell yeah, it'll matter. The problem with communicating with the thing is that it will be extremely tiny, you'd have to have exceptionally tiny wires. Also, the crystal is likely to be extremely fragile to both thermal and electrical, though probably not mechanical, stresses. So yeah, even if you had a nanocomputer crystal, actually accessing it would be a challenge in its own right... =\ Nanotubes might work. Extreme UV lasers might be an option... You'd need a STM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope To even see what you're doing when you're wiring the thing up... Still, the approach seems plausible... If it were to work, It'd reduce the singularity to a software problem... =P -- E T F N H E D E D Powers are not rights. ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-c97d2393 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-2484a968 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
