Using living organisms as logic gates or even general computing devices. Viewed as a computational science this might be considered an especially quaint sub-field of Turing-Machine-hunting. OTOH, the ability to bake real computation into the structures of life has some obvious applications and surely non-obvious ones.
As distinct from doing biology-like computation using computers - that’s a biomimetic algorithm.
Projects like Microsoft’s Station B and Biological computation unit are angling for some market share in this field. There are many others.
References
Adamatzky, Andrew, and Theresa Schubert. 2014. “Slime Mold Microfluidic Logical Gates.” Materials Today 17 (2): 86–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mattod.2014.01.018.
Baer, R M, and H M Martinez. 1974. “Automata and Biology.” Annual Review of Biophysics and Bioengineering 3 (1): 255–91. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.bb.03.060174.001351.
Beniaguev, David, Idan Segev, and Michael London. 2021. “Single Cortical Neurons as Deep Artificial Neural Networks.” Neuron 109 (17): 2727–2739.e3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2021.07.002.
Bray. 1995. “Protein Molecules as Computational Elements in Living Cells.” Nature 376: 307–12. https://doi.org/10.1038/376307a0.
Brette, Romain. 2012. “Computing with Neural Synchrony.” PLoS Comput Biol 8 (6): e1002561. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002561.
Gopalkrishnan, Manoj. 2015. “A Scheme for Molecular Computation of Maximum Likelihood Estimators for Log-Linear Models.” arXiv:1506.03172 [cs, Math, q-Bio, Stat], June. http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03172.
Liang, Yuchen, Chaitanya K. Ryali, Benjamin Hoover, Leopold Grinberg, Saket Navlakha, Mohammed J. Zaki, and Dmitry Krotov. 2021. “Can a Fruit Fly Learn Word Embeddings?” arXiv:2101.06887 [cs, q-Bio, Stat], January. http://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06887.
Orellana, Josue, Jordan Rodu, and Robert E. Kass. 2017. “Population Vectors Can Provide Near Optimal Integration of Information.” Neural Computation 29 (8): 2021–29. https://doi.org/10.1162/neco_a_00992.
Semenov, Sergey N., Lewis J. Kraft, Alar Ainla, Mengxia Zhao, Mostafa Baghbanzadeh, Victoria E. Campbell, Kyungtae Kang, Jerome M. Fox, and George M. Whitesides. 2016. “Autocatalytic, Bistable, Oscillatory Networks of Biologically Relevant Organic Reactions.” Nature 537 (7622): 656–60. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19776.
Straszak, Damian, and Nisheeth K. Vishnoi. 2016. “IRLS and Slime Mold: Equivalence and Convergence.” arXiv:1601.02712 [cs, Math, Stat], January. http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.02712.
Wilkinson, Darren J. 2009. “Stochastic Modelling for Quantitative Description of Heterogeneous Biological Systems.” Nature Reviews Genetics 10 (2): 122–33. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg2509.
No comments yet. Why not leave one?