As I’m nearing graduation and beginning to ready myself for medical school, I’ve been looking for a computer that I can use for the next few years. As I scoured the internet to learn about the best possible computer that I can buy right now, I came across an interesting article. Instead of the hard-wired electrical processors that most of our computers use now, a team of researchers are working to develop a computer which processes information and performs calculations using ordinary chemistry. The computer, also known as a reaction-diffusion computer or a "gooware" computer, utilizes data which is represented by different concentration of ions in a gel-like "soup".
Of course this method of computing is still in the very early stages, but many people who have studied it believe that it could be an alternative to the computers we use now. Conventional computers’ processors work with one piece of data at a time. According to the article, data bits in these computers behave like cars on a traffic grid. The cars (bits) can only use certain roads (wires) and they have to slow down or take a longer route to their destination (memory). In comparison, the "chemical computer" can use ionic waves in this soup to analyze information in all directions simultaneously. Wave technology is being investigated thoroughly to see if it indeed can serve as a viable computational alternative.
The data in these computers will travel by waves, which means that many sets of data will be able to travel together. Processing the data and computing it will still require a detector of some kind to analyze varying concentrations of waves. Thus, a conventional microchip will analyze trends in the waves and convert them to binary code, thereby converting chemical information to electrical. Even after reading the article, I'm still a little skeptical about the future of this kind of computing. Although it will be interesting to see where this field will go in years to come, I think I'll stick to a traditional computer when I buy my next one.
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This computer sounds great for someone performing many large experiments like some of the lab groups in our department. I know that when I worked in a lab many e-mails were sent out asking us to reduce the memory we used in the group. I believe the reasoning was to speed up the processing but in the case of the chemical computer, it sounds like these groups may not have to worry about space to speed up processing. Also, my neighbor Rashad, who some of you met at the "Fast Food Nation" film screening, read this post with me and said that this computer might be interesting to computer gamers.
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