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"I'm strictly an ivory-tower person. I can explain things but I can't do things."
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![]() Vergil Ullam was an unrecognized and unrewarded genius who spent a lot more of his time in the lab working on his pet projects than on his nominal work assignments. Fascinated by the potential of biological computing, he decided to give his own cells a boost up the evolutionary ladder. Eventually, they talked with each other, forming tiny communities that stretched across his body.
If you are interested in this area, take a look at a fascinating 1996 talk by Seymour Cray, who
created the first supercomputer. Here is a short excerpt from his talk, given at the Shannon
Institute for Advanced Studies.
Let's look first at the big DRAM memory. Well, it's packaged in 48 bags. These are called
chromosomes. Now, as we look at those we are a little puzzled because there are some little
ones and some big ones and some middle-sized ones, and how did that happen?
Well, when you think about it, this computing facility started with a very small memory, and
it's been upgraded a number of times, and you know when you go to the store you'd like to get
the biggest DRAM parts, but you have to go with what's available. And that's what happened with
the biological system. It had to go with what was available at the time it was upgraded.
If we look further into the big DRAM memory, we see that probably the packaging isn't
important. Forty-eight banks probably aren't significant. We can view the whole memory as one
string of bits, a one-dimensional memory. And biologists, I think, agree with that today. And
so how big is it? Well, it's six gigabytes."
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