Data in DNA
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A DNA codon consists of 3 base-4 digits (each digit may be one of A, C, G, or T), giving a total of 4^3 or 64 possible values. I fail to see how you could represent 64 states in trinary without some "forbidden" values.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. --Winston Churchill
You are correct. That's what I get for trying to do complex math in the wee hours of the morning. Just as an aside, what would our computer math be like if the early computer developers had used three states for a bit instead of two?
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
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You are correct. That's what I get for trying to do complex math in the wee hours of the morning. Just as an aside, what would our computer math be like if the early computer developers had used three states for a bit instead of two?
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
It depends on which ternary notation you mean. If we used "standard" ternary notation (0, 1, 2), the increased complexity of the circuitry is very likely to make it uneconomical compared with binary notation. Calculation using balanced ternary (-1, 0, 1) has some advantages, but I question whether the increased complexity of the circuitry would make it more viable than binary. I note that only two models of ternary-based computers were built, both in the Soviet Union. Neither was a wild success. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun[^] http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm[^] If, however, we were to use ternary logic as representing "no", "maybe", and "yes" (i.e. one value implies that the datum is uncertain), we might have something new. I don't know of attempts to program "fuzzy logic" in ternary, but would be interested in any examples...
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. --Winston Churchill
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Well, scientists announced they can now store data in DNA. One has to wonder if that's how life here got started - "Coded" DNA left on the surface of the petri dish that we call "Earth".
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013DNA encoding is slightly more complicated than a base four system. DNA uses triplets of four possible nucleotides (Adenosine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine) to encode 21 different amino acids. However, the encoding has no frame of reference. That is, encoding can begin again shifted by 1 or 2 nucleotides. Additionally, the encoding is also represented on the reverse complement making a total of 6 frames of reference, and any or all may be valid. In a programmers world, this is like encoding a second (or third) program by shifting the starting op-code by 1 byte and getting another valid program. Even weirder, imagine shifting the start by 2 bytes, then taking the one's complement of the program and reversing the bit-order to get another valid program. We enforce encoding to have a definitive start, but DNA has no such restriction and allows for a much higher information content.
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You are correct. That's what I get for trying to do complex math in the wee hours of the morning. Just as an aside, what would our computer math be like if the early computer developers had used three states for a bit instead of two?
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
An interesting article about ternary bases. http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/bph-publications/AmSci-2001-11-Hayes-ternary.pdf[^]
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CDP1802 wrote:
Hopefully such a massive and undeliberate mutation will not be able to survive.
That's very insensitive to the massive and undeliberate mutations out here. Very insensitive, indeed. :((
