8 May
2007
8 May
'07
3:52 p.m.
Yes, odd indeed. It was like drinking from a fire hose last night. Anyway,
the theory goes that the entire genome is coded in base triplets which
encode only 64 proteins (6-bits).
This "emulation" problem has been gnawing at him for over 10 years and he
figures that now since the genome is fully mapped (although functions are
still unknown), he can do some good. There has been lots of research, but
any testing or whatever is still performed on live tissue. Why not emulate
it?
I didn't take down his entire curriculum vitae, but he's an EE that got into
medicine (podiatry) and has a side interest in genetics (I guess). Hey, I
read Scientific American, too, and I having a passing interest, but I'm not
a man of medicine.
Apparently he read a paper in which this guy in Japan emulated a cell's
function in silicon. Why not scale it up is his thought.
Anyway, can someone talk 6-bit architecture to this guy?
On 5/7/07 11:13 PM, "Sean Conner" <spc at conman.org> wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Richard A. Cini once
stated:
Rich
--
Rich Cini
Collector of Classic Computers
Build Master and lead engineer, Altair32 Emulator
http://www.altair32.com
http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp
All:
I got an unusual phone call this evening from a doctor on Long Island
who is doing theoretical biological research that, he hopes, will have a
commercial application. Without going into much detail (because it was like
drinking from a fire hose and I can't remember it all), basically he is
looking to emulate some biological processes in software. He believes that
the "instructions" that code for the biological processes are based on 6-bit
instructions (or multiples thereof), so he's looking for someone with that
kind of architectural background. A PDP-8 has 12-bit instructions and I
think the PDP-9 and 15 used 18-bit words. I'm not knowledgeable about any of
the other minicomputer architectures to guess word size, but anything that's
a low multiple of 6-bits should work for his purposes.
If anyone's willing to have a conversation with this person, please
contact me off list and I'll pass on his contact information.
What an odd request. I would think that you could emulate such a device
on just about any CPU and his best bet would be to find anyone that can code
assembly (or that can write an emulator for his six-bit CPU).
I don't see how a six-bit hardware architecture (if such a beast actually
exists) will have a one-to-one mapping to a six-bit biological architecture.
Heck, I would expect an 8-bit CPU to be decent for this, as that gives you
two additional bits for debugging or tracking of some kind.
Heck, it sounds kind of fun (assembly experience: 6809, 8088, some 80386,
68000, MIPS, some VAX, can recognize 8080, Z80 and 6502).
-spc (Even wrote my own Forth-like langauge ... )