I played tic-tac-toe against DNA

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Deoxyribozymes are catalysts made of DNA instead of proteins. With some clever manipulation they can be turned into molecular computers that play tic-tac-toe.

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[SteveMould]

The slowest game of noughts and crosses I've ever played.

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[rentristandelacruz]

Now, DNA computing. It's only a matter of time until Steve Mould discovers slime mold computing. He can create a "Mould's Mold" computer.

[CowCoder]

This guy can really make logic gates out of anything. Steve, next build a 16 bit cpu using crabs.

[goclbert]

I've loved every episode of this series demonstrating the generalizability of computation beyond things which we usually associate with computers.

[thehumblefactory]

To be fair, any time you get beat at a game, by a human, you also get beat by DNA...

[boredwools]

This is the best and most intuitive lesson in microbiology I've ever seen. So good. Steve really goes all in on understanding the subject before making the video! Best educator on in the internet.

[justforplaylists]

I think it would be good to eventually have some way to filter the output. Like, the last output triggers an enzyme to break apart a molecule so that it can fit through a pore in a membrane to go to the next stage.

That way you don't need increasingly longer sequences to code complex logic.

[thomascaldwell]

Science communication, at its very best, explains concepts in such a way that a person not knowledgeable in that area can easily grasp it without needing to gain that detailed knowledge. The explanation uses analogies or examples clear to "laypersons." Steve is very good at that kind of science communication. I have not been clear at all on how DNA could be used to perform logic-- but Steve's explanation makes so much intuitive sense. This is what science communication is all about. Thanks Steve!

[bo_broadwater]

Cool! I studied strand displacement for my PhD! Never thought I'd see a Steve Mould video on it 😁

[CaptainTid]

actually started laughing to myself when you explained how the AND gate physically worked, that's so insanely cool

[matthewgiallourakis]

At the end of the video you mention that fluorescence isn't a useful intermediary step, but it can be!

A professor that I had worked with studied modified DNA that would actuate in the presence of specific wavelengths of light. Then you could make DNA opto-isolators that could bridge DNA logic solutions without having to mix them!

[beeallen]

This is some extremely slow interfacing, but still gives you an idea of how efficient DNA is at data storage and retrieval! I mean that is the purpose of DNA but it's still pretty mind-boggling.

[serotoninja]

The cells of the human brain are encoded by DNA. So this video shows DNA having made a game that DNA is now teaching DNA how to play. Crazy stuff.

[kennymartin]

Thanks for the physical demos Steve! I never thought of chemical processes in mechanical terms like this before!

[Yu-sjwe]

Very cool video! I am glad to see the topic of molecular computing appear in your channel. Actually, those systems you refer at the end (gates with DNA sequences as output) already exist. They can be made in many different ways (for example, look for strand displacement logic gates). It is even more interesting because there are also DNA molecules called aptazymes than can release a DNA sequence when attached to a specific molecule (any type, not just DNA). There is even a method to design these aptazymes to detect specifically any arbitrary molecule you want. This means that you can have a system that translate chemical information to DNA sequences that can be use to perform computations to give some outputs, and, eventually, perform actions based on those outputs.

[Cyrathil]

Considering Boolean algebra kind of originated out of thought experiments of "what if we restricted ourselves to this set of operations", I am kind of interested what the algebra that comes from DNA would look like.

It's interesting that X&&Y&&!Z is not just a composition of AND and NOT, so it's a separate operator. In Boolean algebra we have things like OR, XOR, NAND, etc. It'd be interesting to see DNA equivalents, or if the equivalents are impossible and what is possible.

[khalilahd.]

This is actually so brilliant. It’s amazing to see how far science has come ❤

[Meilen]

So, how long will it take for "Doom on DNA" and "Bad Apple on DNA" videos to pop up?

[marcfruchtman]

The level of complexity in creating these DNA logic machines is incredible. I really admire the author(s) of this paper, "Logic gates in an Automaton". Amazing work. However, the title of the paper should probably be something more like Molecular Logic gates built from DNA" in the title or something like that. Finding this type of paper in a search by someone actually looking for this type of information will have a very difficult time finding it, unless they already knew about it.

[AKKK]

Your explanation is great, the over-complication of the whole project is scary and it still seems like magic even after knowing how it works.