DNA Computing - Thinking beyond Silicon

Hi all,
This article was written by me during my college days. I was just goind through the folders in my system when I stumbled upon this article and thought can share this piece of information with ya. Hope you have a good read

KP - The DevilzAdvocate

“Have you ever wondered as to how genetic information is transferred from one generation to another? Have you ever pondered over how the mutations and evolutions take place? And will you believe if it is said that all these activities are done by millions of supercomputers present inside living organisms? If not, welcome to the world of DNA Computers.”



DNA Computer- A stumper that intrigues us
A DNA computer is a molecular computer that works biochemically. DNA is modified bio-chemically by a variety of enzymes, which are tiny protein machines that read and process DNA according to nature's design. There is a wide variety and number of these "operational" proteins, which manipulate DNA on the molecular level. Many copies of the enzyme can work on many DNA molecules simultaneously. Thus we can say that a DNA computer works in a massively parallel fashion.

Computer with a Chemistry Lab Mien?

The basic notion of a computer, having various Input and output devices and software running them does not fit here. A DNA computer is nothing but a mixture of solution containing the DNA strands and the enzymes taken in a test tube coaxed to crunch algorithms and spit out data.


DNA VS SILICON
"The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell, but it goes like mad!" was a statement made by Richard Feynman with regards to the systems based on the Von Neumann architecture. DNA computers on the other hand are non von Neumann machines which are capable of massive parallel processing and hence the process of computation is approached from a different perspective. Typically, increasing performance of silicon computing means faster clock cycles, where the emphasis is on the speed of the CPU(increasing it will cost you more money :) ) and not on the size of the memory. For DNA computing, the power comes from the memory capacity and parallel processing.

PATRIARCH OF DNA COMPUTING:
In 1994, Leonard Adleman solved directed Hamiltonian path (HP) problem popularly known as the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) in seven days. It was a problem that an average desktop machine could solve in the blink of an eye. But what’s special about his work that we are talking about? It was a landmark demonstration of computing at molecular level. His work brought into limelight the power of DNA in computing. Adleman considered seven nodes each representing a city to solve the problem.
Steps involved in Adleman’s experiment:

• Generate all possible routes.
• Select itineraries that start with the proper city and end with the final city.
• Select itineraries with the correct number of cities.
• Select itineraries that contain each city only once.

All of the above steps were accomplished with standard molecular biology techniques.

APPLICATIONS – An Overview:
CRYPTOGRAPHY:
A field in which DNA computing appears to be particularly interesting is the cryptography. The DES is the Data Encryption Standard that is the IBM's widely used encryption procedure. It uses a 56 bit key to encrypt 64 bit messages. The encryption procedure is known, and the security is based only on the secret encryption key. In [Bon95a], a molecular program that breaks DES is proposed. That is, one (plain-text, cipher-text) pair is given, and the key that maps the plain-text into the cipher-text is found. Conventional (silicon based) computers - using brute force - would take 104 years to solve the same problem (finding the key that maps a particular pair).
SOLVING NP PROBLEMS:
NP problems are a class of problems which have an exponential increase in time complexity as the number of instances increase. DNA Computers can be used to solve NP class of problems in relatively lesser time because of the parallel processing ability. This is best illustrated by Adleman’s experiment.
BIOMEDICAL AND PHARMACEUTICAL FIELDS;
DNA Computers can monitor blood in vitro levels. If there are any chemical imbalances, the DNA would synthesize the needed replacement and release it into blood maintain equilibrium. Autonomous bio-molecular computers may work as doctors in a cell.

WILL DNA SUPPLANT SILICON??
DNA's key advantage is that it will make computers smaller than any computer that has come before them, while at the same time holding more data. One pound of DNA has the capacity to store more information than all the electronic computers ever built; and the computing power of a teardrop-sized DNA computer, using the DNA logic gates, will be more powerful than the world's most powerful supercomputer. More than 10 trillion DNA molecules can fit into an area no larger than 1 cubic centimeter (0.06 cubic inches). With this small amount of DNA, a computer would be able to hold 10 terabytes of data, and perform 10 trillion calculations at a time. By adding more DNA, more calculations could be performed.

However, setting up and extracting results from a DNA computer can take days and sometimes week. The fact that DNA doesn’t behave as expected makes things difficult to obtain accurate results. Human intervention is required in each step of result synthesis which brings in the drawbacks of human errors. Ehud Shapiro, whose team has the Guinness record for “the smallest biological computing device” says, “I think they will live together happily and be used for different applications”.

HOW TO EARN MONEY ONLINE - PART 2

Hi. Hope things are going fine on your side. This is the second and final part of How to earn money online series. The future posts in this category will deal with specific sites. Before proceeding further we will see a brief gist of what we discussed in the previous post. My last post dealt mostly on earning money through blogs. We saw various methods like contextual ads, text links and text links ads, banner advertising among various types of advertising strategies. Sponsered reviews and paid surveys were also discussed. Please refer to How to Earn Money online - Part 1 to read more.
In this part we will be discussing about three major things namely Paid to post, Paid to Click Paid to Read and Paid to surf. Compared to the methods discussed in Part 1, these methods are relatively low on money making capability. But at the end of the day our major objective would be to maximize our earnings as much as possible. With that note in mind lets get started.

PAID TO CLICK(PTC):
Paid to click is the easiest way to earn money online. The only thing which you need to do is get registered with a PTC site, click on the advertisement listed and wait for the 20 second (may vary) timer elapse. Your account will get credited with a maximum of 0.01$. If you have a referral your referral click will fetch you 0.005$. The best way to earn using PTC sites is by building a strong referral base. There are some sites which will allow you to rent referrals or buy referrals. If you have a bit of money to invest on buying referrals then you can easily get the money you invest in days. I am currently a member of Neobux. I will update the list of PTCs soon.
A note of caution, there are loads of PTC scam sites. So do your research before joining them or investing money in them.

PAID TO SURF(PTS):
I do not look at Paid to Surf sites as a money making oppurtunity, rather I look at it as one of the method to drive traffic to my blog. The main idea behind PTS surf is link exchange (i.e) If you view a site for 20 seconds(the timer again varies) someone else will view your site for the same period of time. Before joining a PTS surf one must look at the credit exchange ratio if its 1:1, it means for every site you surf your site will also be surfed once. If its a 2:1 ratio, your site will be surfed for every two sites you surf. Based on the amount of surfing you do, traffic will be generated for your site. PTS also pays you a small amount for every 1000 or 1500 credits (1 site surfed = 1 credit). I would suggest that you look at PTS as a enabler to get traffic to your site so that you can use advertisements. As a stand alone I do not recomend PTS as a money making prospect. Easyhits4u is very reliable PTS.

PAID TO POST(PTP):
Do you like to exchange your view on various topics? Do you like discussions on your topics of interest? Do you enjoying posting in forums, then Paid to Post is the best way to earn money. PTP pays you money for posting in forums. There are sites which offers you a flat rate and there are PTP sites which offers a variable rate based on their algorithms. You can easily earn around 1 - 2$ a day by using PTP. MyLot and Destroy Debt are a few PTP sites which i recommend. They also have a referral program which can add to your income base. A word of caution with respect to PTP - They pay you for your quality view. Do not spam and do not post things like "I agree with you", "yes you are right" and so on. They may remove such posts and deduct the money credited to your account.
P.S: If you start PTP it may end of as an addictive hobby, which you would never regret.

PAID TO READ(PTR):
Paid to Read is similar to PTC , the only difference being you are paid for reading a advertisement e-mail. You need to open the link and confirm the link to get paid. Again there is a referral system and the basis of payment(flat rate or point basis) varies from site to site. I do not prefer PTR because it will spam your mail account with loads of mails. But if you are willing then Take the Internet Back is a site I would recommend.

This concludes the two part series on how to earn money online. If you have further clarifications or comments please feel free to contact me and i will be more than willing to help you out. Your suggestions and comments are always welcome. Hope you make money, loads of em.

Till my next post. Adieu
KP- The DevilzAdvocate.

P.S: If you wanna add any sites which you feel is genuine please contact me so that i can update the information and if possible review the site.

UPDATES:

DestroyDebt has stopped its revenue sharing program. This is very unfortunate. They paid me $5.96 when the revenue sharing program was stopped. Thanks to the spammers, a genuine site has stopped paying.

PostParker is a new PTP site which I am currently trying out. Join if you are interested. It is similar to myLot.

NoMinCashOut has paid a few of my friends and is currently reliable. You can join and earn some good money in this PTC.