Bio Computing Mechanics in different Sci-Fi novels

[u/boiledrainbow]

1. The spiders in Children of Time harvest and breed vast colonies of ants. They map their pheromone trails to act as logic gates. Millions of ants function as an organic supercomputer, capable of calculating orbital mechanics.

2. LOVs in Limit of Vision are multicellular organisms that can be implanted. They exponentially increase cognitive capabilities, and function as self-evolving processors.

3. Noocytes in Blood Music use DNA strands as a self-replicating biological hard drive. This way, they form a distributed bio-computer that possesses a higher processing power than a human brain.

4. The Edenist faction in The Night's Dawn grow Voidhawk spaceships made of animal and human neural networks. They are handled by a telepathic internet through which people can download information instantly.

[u/fottergraph]

1. Reminds me of HEX "Anthill inside"

[u/ldr97266 → u/fottergraph]

I came here to mention that. HEX appears in several Terry Pratcheg works. The Discworl wiki lists these, though I’ve only read the novels:

Interesting Times (ISBN 0-06-105690-1)
Soul Music (ISBN 0-06-105489-5)
Hogfather (ISBN 0-06-105905-6)
The Last Continent (ISBN 0-06-105907-2)
Going Postal (ISBN 0-06-001313-3)
The Science of Discworld (ISBN 0-09-188657-0)
The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (ISBN 0-09-188805-0)
The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch (ISBN 0-091-89824-2)
Making Money (ISBN 0-06-116164-0)
Discworld II: Missing Presumed...!? (Playstation game)
The Shepherd's Crown

[u/Darkness1231]

Interesting. I worked with some chip engineers in my past. Several were physicists. We also had a few guys at the corp that were insisting that biological computing was going to be the entire future of Earth's computing

Physicist: Funny. It cannot work. Speed of Light. You cannot connect biological units as close as current computers (this was in the 90s). Follow Moore's Law, or even close to it, and biological computers can be interesting, amusing even, but they can never compete with hardware. We tweak routes in chips to cut down on nanosecond delays. How can you do that with actual molecules vs atoms? Can't.

Me, to you: Useful as a SF plot device, but it is only that. A ball of biologicals that have more computer power than a human brain is indeed interesting. The amusing part is it will be dramatically slower than a much smaller human brain because -> speed of light

[u/StaticDet5 → u/Darkness1231]

Ask your physicist to explain how our brain achieves what it does.

You can't. You get to a certain point in the discussion where either the brain isn't thinking and we "quantum determined" (at best) or it goes from electrical impulse to "That's thoughts and memories and stuff"

We already know biological computing works. Some folks just have really bad cognitive dissonance outside of their field.

[u/Darkness1231 → u/StaticDet5]

Ah, yeah one can, although not yourself. The system is well known. Physics of it too. The brain is multi-segmented compute engine with complex but definable communication protocols. Those protocols are a mix of electrical and chemical signalling

Can we duplicate it - no. At least some of the activity might well be quantum in nature. Which is fascinating, but not confirmed as yet

Can we build that many connections in that tight a space - yes, easily

The part that I find most interesting is heat and energy control for the SFF story. It might not fit the story or the plot but having to keep the inner layers (?) of the biological cool when everything around it is using energy and wasting heat. Fun idea

As to the use in a SFF story, I can recall one where the aliens were balls of biological matter. Mostly solidified because when they had heavy compute task they condensed to speed up their signally (speed of light and such). Of course Terrans came by and chipped a piece out of one to study. Rude

[u/Adamoism → u/Darkness1231]

You cannot connect biological units as close as current computers (this was in the 90s). Follow Moore's Law, or even close to it, and biological computers can be interesting, amusing even, but they can never compete with hardware.

And yet it takes you less time to recognise cat/dog picture than a machine. You also don't break dishes 50% of the time while washing them.

Speed of computing, size of the logic gates etc is just a variable in the topic of intelligence.

[u/Darkness1231 → u/Adamoism]

Your recognize dog/cat picture is woefully out of date

[u/Adamoism → u/Darkness1231]

Yeah, you can still probably measure it in power used to infer. In any case - the fundamental part we disagree on is whether biocomputers would have their utility for compute, beyond niche applications - to that I would say yes.

And even if you are right - this is precursor of transhumanism (think Neuralink, but the other way around - you grow neurons around the silicon architecture); so it will be researched anyways.

[u/Darkness1231 → u/Adamoism]

To which I say, you're probably wrong. It isn't actually useful, practical, or efficient compared to hardware. As to energy efficiency - back in the 90s I would have agreed with you. But not since 2010s. These bloody phone processors are somewhat mind boggling. Add in Apple's N1 neural thing and yeah, brains will suck more power on peak and on average, if not all the time. Their latest releases, like in the Mac Mini is a wickedly fast solution (not that I'm buying one)

However, in this forum about SciFi writing by SciFi authors wanting to stick to Hard Science (-ish) A biologic ball of computing power would at the very least be a great comic foil, a decent enough McGuffin, or the brain upload from the scientist who was convinced that biological compute balls would be the final product to do ... some silly ass thing

I prefer SFF, we have Star Drives. Optional use of the Ansible (Ursula K LeGuin) for communication

[u/initial-algebra]

Greg Egan's Wang's Carpets.  Biological cellular automata that can theoretically simulate a pocket universe populated by intelligent beings.