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In something that sounds like it came straight out of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, scientists have created a DNA computer that can assemble itself.
According to New Scientist, this creation, made by Constantine Evans and his colleagues at Maynooth University in Ireland, used “DNA tiles” that can attach to one another to make larger 2D structures.
Add that to the discovery that, thanks to human scientists, robots can now detect if they’ve been stabbed, self-heal, and continue moving, and it really does sound like we are on the precipice of Terminator 2: Judgment Day becoming real.
James Cameron tried to warn us.
As for these DNA computers that can assemble themselves, the researchers explained in their paper published in the journal Nature, “Specifically, we design a set of 917 DNA tiles that can self-assemble in three alternative ways such that competitive nucleation depends sensitively on the extent of colocalization of high-concentration tiles within the three structures. The system was trained in silico to classify a set of 18 grayscale 30 × 30 pixel images into three categories.”
Those categories were represented by the three letters H, A and M that the DNA computers had to assemble themselves.
New Scientist explains…
Constantine says this let the team generate a specific test tube mix of DNA tiles for each image in such a way that an M image produced a final mixture rich in M letters, while an H image produced a final mix with plenty of H letters and an A image produced mostly A letters in the final mix. In this way, the self-assembling tiles converted a pattern of concentrations into a final answer. In essence, the system behaved like a neural network that might classify an image as a cat or a dog based on its pixel patterns.
“Biology with its genetic program is the premier example of molecular computation where the point of the computation is to create something. We wanted to explore that angle of computation,” said one of the study’s researchers Erik Winfree at the California Institute of Technology.
“We’re hoping that people who don’t care about DNA at all… will be convinced that this is a new way to do computation,” added fellow researcher Arvind Murugan of the University of Chicago.
In December of 2022, MIT scientists revealed they were making intelligent autonomous robots capable of “assembling larger structures, including larger robots.”
Self-replicating autonomous robots. Self-healing robots. And now DNA computers that can assemble themselves.
Yep. It’s just a matter of time.