BGB wrote:
Whoa, I think you just invented "nanotech organelles", at least this
is the first time I've heard that idea and it seems pretty
mind-blowing. What would a cell use a cpu for?
mostly so that microbes could be programmed in a manner more like
larger-scale computers.
say, the microbe has its basic genome and capabilities, which can be
treated more like hardware, and then a person can write behavioral
programs in a C-like language or similar, and then compile them and
run them on the microbes.
for larger organisms, possibly the cells could network together and
form into a sort of biological computer, then you can possibly have
something the size of an insect with several GB of storage and
processing power rivaling a modern PC, as well as possibly other
possibilities, such as the ability to communicate via WiFi or similar.
you might want to google "biological computing" - you'll start finding
things like this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/jul/24/bacteria-computer
(title: "Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators")
alternatively could be the possibility of having an organism with more
powerful neurons, such that rather than neurons communicating via
simple impulses, they can send more complex messages (neuron fires
with extended metadata, ...). then neurons can make more informed
decisions about whether to fire off a message.
cells do lots of nifty stuff, but most of their functionality is more
based around cellular survival than about computational tasks.
Ummm.... have you heard of:
1. Brains (made up of cells),
2. Our immune systems,
3. The complex behaviors of fungi
Think massively parallel/distributed computation focused on organism
level survival and behavior. If you want to program colonies of nano
machines (biological or otherwise), you're going to have to start
thinking of something a very different kinds of algorithms, running on
something a lot more powerful than a small cpu programmed in c.
Start thinking billions of actors, running on highly parallel hardware,
and we might start approaching what cells do today. (FYI, try googling
"micro-tubules" and you'll find some interesting papers on how these
sub-cellular structures just might act like associative arrays :-)
Cheers,
Miles Fidelman
so, you have microbes that eat things, or produce useful byproducts,
but none that actually accomplish specific tasks or perform actions
on-command (such as, say, microbes which build things).
like, say, you could have a tub of gloop, which when instructed, could
make objects like cell-phones, ..., which a person can make use of,
and when done using it, they can put it back into the tub and issue a
command and the organic gloop would decompose it again (back into raw
materials).
then, if it runs low on raw materials, you can dump in some "gloop
food", which gives it more of the things it needs both to survive and
to build more stuff.
potentially, you could also make things like essentially "living
robots", which can perform usual robotic tasks, but which can
replicate themselves and heal damage more like living organisms, solar
power plants that are, essentially, giant plants, ...
although, yes, some of this does bring up the possibility that
scary/nasty stuff could also be possible, like, say, living buildings
which eat their occupants, mass replication of near-indestructible
critters, random emergence of things like "the blob", ... (some could
arise either by accident, such as genetic mutations leading to
malfunction, or by deliberate acts, such as sabotage or weaponized
critters).
I was being more metaphorical in my first post. I've been looking at
an "algorithmic biology" website (
http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/ ) and thinking about L-systems
that, instead of being geometrical, instead are somehow mapping into
"spaces" of... I don't know exactly how to explain it. They've got
dynamic models mimicking forest growth by modelling growth and light
availability and such. What if, for example, your distributed
application could use something like this to allocate nodes or other
resources dynamically in response to usage and available resources?
It seems like a start on how to think about a program/OS that can
cooperate with copies of itself to cope dynamically with changing
conditions and inputs.
yep, fair enough...
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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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