Natural Computing: DNA, Quantum Bits, and the Future of Smart Machines PDF Download

Author: Dennis E. Shasha
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393077195
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

View

Book Description
Reports from the cutting edge, where physics and biology are changing the fundamental assumptions of computing. Computers built from DNA, bacteria, or foam. Robots that fix themselves on Mars. Bridges that report when they are aging. This is the bizarre and fascinating world of Natural Computing. Computer scientist and Scientific American’s “Puzzling Adventures” columnist Dennis Shasha here teams up with journalist Cathy Lazere to explore the outer reaches of computing. Drawing on interviews with fifteen leading scientists, the authors present an unexpected vision: the future of computing is a synthesis with nature. That vision will change not only computer science but also fields as disparate as finance, engineering, and medicine. Space engineers are at work designing machines that adapt to extreme weather and radiation. “Wetware” processing built on DNA or bacterial cells races closer to reality. One scientist’s “extended analog computer” measures answers instead of calculating them using ones and zeros. In lively, readable prose, Shasha and Lazere take readers on a tour of the future of smart machines.

Author: Dennis E. Shasha
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393336832
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 297

View

Book Description
Drawing on interviews with 15 leading scientists, the authors present an unexpected vision: the future of computing is a synthesis with nature.

Author: Jessica Chang
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers
ISBN: 160845696X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 75

View

Book Description
In the history of modern computation, large mechanical calculators preceded computers. A person would sit there punching keys according to a procedure and a number would eventually appear. Once calculators became fast enough, it became obvious that the critical path was the punching rather than the calculation itself. That is what made the stored program concept vital to further progress. Once the instructions were stored in the machine, the entire computation could run at the speed of the machine. This book shows how to do the same thing for DNA computing. Rather than asking a robot or a person to pour in specific strands at different times in order to cause a DNA computation to occur (by analogy to a person punching numbers and operations into a mechanical calculator), the DNA instructions are stored within the solution and guide the entire computation. We show how to store straight line programs, conditionals, loops, and a rudimentary form of subroutines. To achieve this goal, the book proposes a complete language for describing the intrinsic topology of DNA complexes and nanomachines, along with the dynamics of such a system. We then describe dynamic behavior using a set of basic transitions, which operate on a small neighborhood within a complex in a well-defined way. These transitions can be formalized as purely syntactical functions of the string representations. Building on that foundation, the book proposes a novel machine motif which constitutes an instruction stack, allowing for the clocked release of an arbitrary sequence of DNA instruction or data strands. The clock mechanism is built of special strands of DNA called "tick" and "tock." Each time a "tick" and "tock" enter a DNA solution, a strand is released from an instruction stack (by analogy to the way in which as a clock cycle in an electronic computer causes a new instruction to enter a processing unit). As long as there remain strands on the stack, the next cycle will release a new instruction strand. Regardless of the actual strand or component to be released at any particular clock step, the "tick" and "tock" fuel strands remain the same, thus shifting the burden of work away from the end user of a machine and easing operation. Pre-loaded stacks enable the concept of a stored program to be realized as a physical DNA mechanism. A conceptual example is given of such a stack operating a walker device. The stack allows for a user to operate such a clocked walker by means of simple repetition of adding two fuel types, in contrast to the previous mechanism of adding a unique fuel -- at least 12 different types of strands -- for each step of the mechanism. We demonstrate by a series of experiments conducted in Ned Seeman's lab that it is possible to "initialize" a clocked stored program DNA machine. We end the book with a discussion of the design features of a programming language for clocked DNA programming. There is a lot left to do. Table of Contents: Introduction / Notation / A Topological Description of DNA Computing / Machines and Motifs / Experiment: Storing Clocked Programs in DNA / A Clocked DNA Programming Language

Author: Damith Herath
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811003211
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 452

View

Book Description
The first compendium on robotic art of its kind, this book explores the integration of robots into human society and our attitudes, fears and hopes in a world shared with autonomous machines. It raises questions about the benefits, risks and ethics of the transformative changes to society that are the consequence of robots taking on new roles alongside humans. It takes the reader on a journey into the world of the strange, the beautiful, the uncanny and the daring – and into the minds and works of some of the world’s most prolific creators of robotic art. Offering an in-depth look at robotic art from the viewpoints of artists, engineers and scientists, it presents outstanding works of contemporary robotic art and brings together for the first time some of the most influential artists in this area in the last three decades. Starting from a historical review, this transdisciplinary work explores the nexus between robotic research and the arts and examines the diversity of robotic art, the encounter with robotic otherness, machine embodiment and human–robot interaction. Stories of difficulties, pitfalls and successes are recalled, characterising the multifaceted collaborations across the diverse disciplines required to create robotic art. Although the book is primarily targeted towards researchers, artists and students in robotics, computer science and the arts, its accessible style appeals to anyone intrigued by robots and the arts.

Author: Hugh F. Cline
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317703219
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

View

Book Description
This book argues that information communication technologies are not creating new forms of social structure, but rather altering long-standing institutions and amplifying existing trends of social change that have their origins in ancient times. Using a comparative historical perspective, it analyzes the applications of information communication technologies in relation to changes in norms and values, education institutions, the socialization of children, new forms of deviant and criminal behaviors, enhanced participation in religious activities, patterns of knowledge creation and use, the expansion of consumerism, and changing experiences of distance and time.

Author: Jessen Havill
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1482254166
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 740

View

Book Description
Discovering Computer Science: Interdisciplinary Problems, Principles, and Python Programming introduces computational problem solving as a vehicle of discovery in a wide variety of disciplines. With a principles-oriented introduction to computational thinking, the text provides a broader and deeper introduction to computer science than typical introductory programming books. Organized around interdisciplinary problem domains, rather than programming language features, each chapter guides students through increasingly sophisticated algorithmic and programming techniques. The author uses a spiral approach to introduce Python language features in increasingly complex contexts as the book progresses. The text places programming in the context of fundamental computer science principles, such as abstraction, efficiency, and algorithmic techniques, and offers overviews of fundamental topics that are traditionally put off until later courses. The book includes thirty well-developed independent projects that encourage students to explore questions across disciplinary boundaries. Each is motivated by a problem that students can investigate by developing algorithms and implementing them as Python programs. The book's accompanying website — http://discoverCS.denison.edu — includes sample code and data files, pointers for further exploration, errata, and links to Python language references. Containing over 600 homework exercises and over 300 integrated reflection questions, this textbook is appropriate for a first computer science course for computer science majors, an introductory scientific computing course or, at a slower pace, any introductory computer science course.

Author: William J. Turkel
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142140981X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 303

View

Book Description
How encounters with strongly electric fish informed our grasp of electricity. Spark from the Deep tells the story of how human beings came to understand and use electricity by studying the evolved mechanisms of strongly electric fish. These animals have the ability to shock potential prey or would-be predators with high-powered electrical discharges. William J. Turkel asks completely fresh questions about the evolutionary, environmental, and historical aspects of people’s interest in electric fish. Stimulated by painful encounters with electric catfish, torpedos, and electric eels, people learned to harness the power of electric shock for medical therapies and eventually developed technologies to store, transmit, and control electricity. Now we look to these fish as an inspiration for engineering new sensors, computer interfaces, autonomous undersea robots, and energy-efficient batteries.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 680

View

Book Description

Author: Ray Kurzweil
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101077883
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 404

View

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Bold futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, offers a framework for envisioning the future of machine intelligence—“a book for anyone who wonders where human technology is going next” (The New York Times Book Review). “Kurzweil offers a thought-provoking analysis of human and artificial intelligence and a unique look at a future in which the capabilities of the computer and the species that invented it grow ever closer.”—BILL GATES Imagine a world where the difference between man and machine blurs, where the line between humanity and technology fades, and where the soul and the silicon chip unite. This is not science fiction. This is the twenty-first century according to Ray Kurzweil, the “restless genius” (The Wall Street Journal), “ultimate thinking machine” (Forbes), and inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era. In his inspired hands, life in the new millennium no longer seems daunting. Instead, it promises to be an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live. More than just a list of predictions, Kurzweil’s prophetic blueprint for the future guides us through the inexorable advances that will result in: • Computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain (with human-level capabilities not far behind) • Relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers • Information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways Eventually, the distinction between humans and computers will have become sufficiently blurred that when the machines claim to be conscious, we will believe them.

Author: Siddhartha Bhattacharyya
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0323851797
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 420

View

Book Description
The field of computational intelligence has grown tremendously over that past five years, thanks to evolving soft computing and artificial intelligent methodologies, tools and techniques for envisaging the essence of intelligence embedded in real life observations. Consequently, scientists have been able to explain and understand real life processes and practices which previously often remain unexplored by virtue of their underlying imprecision, uncertainties and redundancies, and the unavailability of appropriate methods for describing the incompleteness and vagueness of information represented. With the advent of the field of computational intelligence, researchers are now able to explore and unearth the intelligence, otherwise insurmountable, embedded in the systems under consideration. Computational Intelligence is now not limited to only specific computational fields, it has made inroads in signal processing, smart manufacturing, predictive control, robot navigation, smart cities, and sensor design to name a few. Recent Trends in Computational Intelligence Enabled Research: Theoretical Foundations and Applications explores the use of this computational paradigm across a wide range of applied domains which handle meaningful information. Chapters investigate a broad spectrum of the applications of computational intelligence across different platforms and disciplines, expanding our knowledge base of various research initiatives in this direction. This volume aims to bring together researchers, engineers, developers and practitioners from academia and industry working in all major areas and interdisciplinary areas of computational intelligence, communication systems, computer networks, and soft computing. - Provides insights into the theory, algorithms, implementation, and application of computational intelligence techniques - Covers a wide range of applications of deep learning across various domains which are researching the applications of computational intelligence - Investigates novel techniques and reviews the state-of-the-art in the areas of machine learning, computer vision, soft computing techniques