DNA Computing

There is a classic problem in logistics called "The Traveling Salesman". Imagine a salesman who has to visit, say, 25 cities on a regular basis. What is the fastest route that will take him through all the cities, without the poor salesman having to go through the same city twice?

It may sound simple, but the problem becomes more and more complex the more cities the salesman has to travel through. Modern silicon-based computers do not have enough computing power to solve the complex maths involved in this problem. The reason for this is that in order to solve the problem, it must create a list of all the possible routes and then search this list to find the correct answer - an extremely time-consuming task.

Enter the DNA computer. A single strand of DNA does not yield much power. But DNA can be replicated, so that you can have as much DNA as you need to perform incredibly difficult tasks. And the strange property of a DNA computer is that it can test all the solutions simultaneously - a truly parallell task. What comes out of a DNA computer is simply the right answer - if you have enough DNA to start with.

Recent breakthroughs have shown that DNA computers can solve the problem for up to 15 cities. Not much, you may say - but for a computer which does not carry a single chip, it is just the beginning. In the future, DNA computers will be able to solve extremely difficult tasks by sheer power - they will be able to do so many parallell calculations that the answer pops up immediately.

So is the silicon computer dead? Not by a long shot. A DNA computer may excel at solving one extremely difficult problem at a time, but modern computers are more practical, can do most anything (like let you play computer games and surf the net).

So perhaps you should hold on to that desktop computer a little while longer - unless you're a traveling salesman, of course.

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