"Biological" Programming/Hardware?

[ScaryBinary]

I was just wondering - has anyone here ever designed a program, system, whatever, that somehow uses biological properties of nature to accomplish some task? For example, perhaps a computer network where each computer functions like a nueron in a brain, or using the known properties of DNA to make self-replicating and/or self-repairing code?

I was just thinking, there's some pretty amazing stuff out there in the natural world; it'd be pretty cool to incorporate those properties into computing somehow.

[krusty the klown]

Have you heard of neural networks??

Not that I know a lot about them, but they are supposed to work in a similar fashion to the brain.

They allow you to feed a set of data with many variables in and the system will develop an empirical relationship to provide the solution. For example, if you had pregnancy data and had, say 4 inputs e.g. age, previous children, smoking and alcohol consumption and wanted to use this to predict whether there would be an increased risk of premature birth, you would feed the system with a data set and known outcomes, the system would then 'learn' (this is called the training set). You then test the system by feeding it a data set that it's never seen before and see how well it performs. When you are happy with the response, you can let it loose on data that you don't know the outcome to and thus use it to predict the likelihood of premature birth.

Something like that http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[Paul V]

I study the cutting edge of the hardware and medical fields, as I am going into biomed engineering. This molecular level computing is not yet possible, due to the sheer minute scale of the problem.

However, I wouldn't put it out of the "something possible in 10-15 years" category.

[daveleau]

I did read an article on DNA being used to make simple calculations. It is possible. I believe it was published in Science but it may have also been ont he CNN web site. Not sure. Pretty neat stuff. I can't remember where the lab was that did this.
Dave

[ScaryBinary]

Of course I've heard of neural nets! That's what they catch neural fish in, right? (ha ha I'll be here all week).

I remember reading an article describing how a group of scientists had recronstructed the brain of some insect using electronic parts. Of course, this insect only had like 11 brain cells, but they got a machine to completely mimic the behavior of the real thing by using this electronic brain, from searching for food to crawling around obstacles. It sounded pretty cool.

Also about a year ago I read an article describing how a scientist had somehow gotten neurons to bond with a computer chip. He could send inputs through the cells into the processor. Also pretty cool.

I apologize if I've repetedly misspelled "neural!"

Scary http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/icons/icon11.gif Binary

[This message has been edited by ScaryBinary (edited 05-04-2000).]

[agentcue]

read the June 98 issue of Discover magizine,
veryinteresting stuff. Try
http://208.245.156.153/archive/output.cfm?ID=1455

[yaroa]

Dave, that article is in the April edition of Discovery magazine.

[agentcue]

close enough.