Hmm. I think you're going to have problems with thermodynamics here.
While it is possible to perform computations using chemical reactions,
an *energy source* is required to drive the process. The word
"nutrients" implies a substance containing chemical energy, but in that
case no garbage-collected structures are every going to "dissolve into"
nutrients; energy would need to be injected at this step somehow. (Not
to say it's impossible of course; just to say it's more complicated than
you seem to realise.)
You can do some amazing things with protiens - they're increadible
molecules. But designing one to perform a specific task it currently
*way* beyond cutting-edge science. I would suggest that a better
approach would be to utilise not individual molecules but small
single-celled plants. Genetically engineering such plants to perform
useful operations would probably be orders of magnitude easier than
trying to design individual molecules to do it. And since these are
plants, they can produce their own chemical energy from sunlight. And
grow more working units. It wouldn't be trivial by any stretch of the
imagination, but given decades and lots of funding, someone might well
build organisms that self-organise into a working G-machine.
Personally though, I think it would probably be vastly easier to just
write some VHDL for chips that understand G-code. ;-)
(Actually, I've been thinking about what would happen if instead of
having a bunch of memory registers over here, and a bunch of processor
logic over there, what if each memory register also had a little bit of
processing logic along with it? Then things could get massively
parallel... But the more I think about it, the more that idea doesn't
really work. The limiting factor would rapidly become "how to we get
data between distant registers?" And where would you put a "program" in
this system anyway? About the closing working analogue I can think of is
ANN chips...)
[rambling over]
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
