A biocomputer built from connected heart cells solves computational problems with high accuracy and at a low computational cost.It is an understatement to say that modern computers have and continue to shape civilization. Since their implementation, information has become more accessible, technological feats such as space exploration became possible, entertainment became more entertaining, and communication made easier.However, computer scientists are hitting a wall when it comes to dealing with the vast amounts of data being generated, which contribute a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the form of energy required to run computations and store data in storage centers.Turning to biologyAs computational tasks become more and more complex, there is an exponential increase in the amount of computing resources, such as memory and time. While computers are being designed to be more and more powerful and efficient, there is still a lag, which motivated a team of scientists from the University of Notre Dame in the US to explore alternative computing models that require less time and energy to run.“We humans have evolved over billions of years and [our bodies] exhibit high efficiency and powerful multi-tasking capabilities that artificial devices can hardly achieve,” said Jiaying Ji, a graduate student in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame advised by Pinar Zorlutuna, Sheehan Family Collegiate Professor of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and the principal investigator of the project.In their study published in Advanced Intelligent Systems, Zorlutuna and collaborators, including Suman Datta, Joseph M Pettit Chair in Advanced Computing and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Nikhil Shukla, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Virginia, report the development of a biocomputing device inspired by the brain and heart.
Composed of over two billion muscle cells, the heart consumes only six Watts (W) of energy to sustain constant, daily beating — this is in comparison to the most common type of light bulb, which consumes 60 W. The human brain also exhibits powerful multi-tasking capabilities, precisely controlling breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and many other physiological functions at same time.
“Inspired by nature’s advantages over modern computers, we aimed to combine the efficiency of the heart and the information processing ability of brain to build a new bio-computing platform for solving computationally hard problems, problems that current modern computers fail at,” said Ji.
“Inspired by nature’s advantages over modern computers, we aimed to combine the efficiency of the heart and the information processing ability of brain to build a new bio-computing platform for solving computationally hard problems, problems that current modern computers fail at,” said Ji.
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