Scientific American reported that the DNA-based computers now can play Tic-Tac-Toe. Why is this a big deal? This is significant not because DNA-computers will all of a sudden replace conventional servers to power the enterprise. Conventional computing started out solving basic binary problems in the 1940s which is now paralleled with the 2002 announcement when DNA biological computers solving similar complexity problems. That was 4 years ago. Now we have a basic “thinking machine” under way. Conventional computing fueled by Moore’s law got us to enterprise class by the 1970s, client server the late 1980s, the web 1.0 by the 1990s.
DNA computing may do for enterprise and web computing what the first genome sequencing did for biotech. The question is what kind of enterprises will emerge as a result. What problems will be solved in new ways? The first applications are obviously biotech - currently targeting disease modeling, like the West-Nile virus. But is there an emergent DNA-Web infrastructure or just better modeling in biotech and nanotech?
The MAYA-II DNA computer:
It even reminds me of the first Sinclair computer from 1982(below).
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