Decades after his death, the ideas of British mathematician Alan Turing are
still heavily influencing computer scientists. Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann
Institute in Rehovot, Israel has now created a hypothetical computer called a
Turing machine using nucleic acid molecules. A long polymer molecule emulates
the infinitely long tape envisaged in Turing’s model, while a “rule molecule”
operates on sections of it to read and write data using techniques similar to
those used by ribosomes, the protein factories inside cells.
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