Sunday, March 9, 2008

Notable Advancements in Biocomputer Technology

Currently, biocomputers exist with various functional capabilities that include operations of logic and mathematical calculations. T. Knight of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory first suggested a biochemical computing scheme in which protein concentrations are used as binary signals that ultimately serve to perform logical operations (349).2 At or above a certain concentration of a particular biochemical product in a biocomputer chemical pathway indicates a signal that is either a 1 or a 0, and a concentration below this level indicates the other, remaining signal. Using this method as computational analysis, biochemical computers can perform logical operations in which the appropriate binary output will occur only under specific, logical constraints on the initial conditions. In other words, the appropriate binary output serves as a logically derived conclusion from a set of initial conditions that serve as premises from which the logical conclusion can be made. In addition to these types of logical operations, biocomputers have also been shown to demonstrate other functional capabilities, such as mathematical computations. One such example was provided by W.L. Ditto, who in 1999 created a biocomputer composed of leech neurons at Georgia Tech which was capable of performing simple addition. These are just a few of the notable uses that biocomputers have already been engineered to perform, and the capabilities of biocomputers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Because of the availability and potential economic efficiency associated with producing biomolecules and biocomputers, as noted above, the advancement of the technology of biocomputers is a popular, rapidly growing subject of research that is likely to see much progress in the future.

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