Computing device to serve as basis for biologica...( the Turing machine is a general-purpose...)

the Turing machine is a general-purpose, universal, programmable computer and is key to the theoretical foundations of computer science, it has never before been embodied in an actual computing device. Shapiro's mechanical device embodies the theoretical Turing machine, and as such is a general-purpose programmable computer.

The device employs a chain of three-dimensional building blocks to represent the Turing machine's tape, and uses another set of building blocks to encode the machine's program rules. In each cycle the device processes one "rule molecule." The device is designed so that the processing of the molecule modifies the polymer representing the Turing machine's tape in accordance with the intended meaning of the rule.

At the conference, Shapiro will present a 30-cm high plastic model of his mechanical computer. He hopes that in the future, with the advent of improved techniques for the analysis and synthesis of biomolecular machines, the actual computer could possibly be built from biological molecules, so that it would measure about 25 millionths of a millimeter in length, roughly the size of a ribosome.

The Computer and the Ribosome
In fact, Prof Shapiro designed the mechanical computer with the ultimate goal of constructing it from biological molecules. The computer is not more complicated than existing biomolecular machines of the living cell such as the ribosome, and all its operations are part of the standard repertoire of these machines. These operations include the mechanical equivalents of polymer elongation, cleavage and ligation, as well as moving along a polymer and being controlled by coordinated structural changes.

The ribosome is the molecular machine of the living cell that performs the final step of interpretation of the genetic code by translating messenger RNA, which is transcribed from DNA, into protein. A key similarity between Shapiro's mechanical computer and the r
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Contact: Jeffrey J. Sussman
Jeffrey@acwis.org
212-779-2500
American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science
30-Jun-1999

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