DNA computers? I think the answer is “we outclassed them”. At 10nm, transistors are about the size of 10 base-pairs at this point, but much faster and much less error prone.
I think DNA has semiconductors beat on average information density though. A tube of DNA can contain a datacenter’s worth of information. Read times are abysmal and error rate is through the roof, but it’s relatively stable on the order of hundreds of years.
Just isn’t something in super high demand. That and density are probably the only major advantages right? And I don’t imagine the equipment to "read" that data will be very compact in the foreseeable future.
If the demand was high enough I bet there would already be profitable companies pursuing it. I do see it as a potential market though. It’s no fun having a cold storage archive that needs constant hardware replacements.
I would imagine reading would be done in a similar way as it is today: amplification and sequencing. Data would have to be given a hefty amount of data correction. There are no apparent show stoppers that I’m aware of, just not enough interest.
We're still not even close for energy efficiency though. I can't remember the exact figures, but for most tasks the Brain is much more efficient per joule than any CPU.
This is true for things people have evolved to do, but a cell phone can do a lifetimes worth of arithmetic in less than a second using negligible energy relative 2000 calories per day for 70 years
True, though I don’t think that’s a “DNA” computer in the same way that merely using semiconductors doesn’t makes my laptop a “quantum” computer.
Going with the Kuzweil estimate on Wikipedia, human brains are about 1e15 ops/Joule, whereas the best in the Green500 list (June 2019) is 1.76e10 ops/Joule.
