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There
is ample evidence that MIT’s [Center for Bits and Atoms] is
directed
by a genius. Neil Gershenfeld has pulled together twenty research
groups
from across campus. He has inspired them to produce impressive
results in
fields as diverse as biomolecule motors and cheap networked
light switches.
Neil teaches a wildly popular course called “How to make (almost)
anything,”
showing techies and non-techies alike how to use rapid prototyping
equipment
to make projects that they themselves are interested in. And
even that is
just the start. He has designed and built “Fab Labs” — rooms
with only
$20,000 worth of rapid-prototyping equipment, located in remote
areas of
remote countries, that are being used to make crucial products.
Occasionally
he talks to rooms full of military generals about how installing
networked
computers can defuse a war zone by giving people better things
to do than
fight.
http://cba.mit.edu/
So when
[Neil Gershenfeld says] that there is no way to build large
complex
nanosystems using traditional engineering, I listen very carefully.
I have
been thinking that large-scale nano-based products can be
designed and built
entirely with traditional engineering. But he probably knows
my field better
than I do. Is it possible that we are both right? I've read
his statements
very carefully several times, and I think that in fact we
don't disagree. He
is talking about large complex nanosystems, while I am talking
about large
simple nanosystems.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gershenfeld03/gershenfeld_index.html
The key
question is errors. Here's what Neil says about errors: “That,
in
turn, leads to what I'd say is the most challenging thing
of all that we're
doing. If you take the last things I've mentioned—printing
logic, molecular
logic, and eventually growing, living logic—it means that
we will be able to
engineer on Avogadro scales, with complexity on the scale
of thermodynamics.
Avogadro's number, 10^23, is the number of atoms in a macroscopic
object,
and we'll eventually create systems with that many programmable
components.
The only thing you can say with certainty about this possibility
is that
such systems will fail if they're designed in any way we understand
right
now.”
In other
words, errors accumulate rapidly, and when working at the
nanoscale, they can and do creep in right from the beginning.
A
kilogram-scale system composed of nanometer-scale parts will
have on the
order of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 parts. And even if
by some miracle
it is manufactured perfectly, at least one of those parts
will be damaged by
background radiation within seconds of manufacture.
Of course,
errors plague the large crude systems we build today. When
an
airplane requires a computer to stay in the air, we don't
use one
computer—we use three, and if one disagrees with the other
two, we take it
offline and replace it immediately. But can we play the same
trick when
engineering with Avogadro numbers of parts? Here's Neil again:
“Engineers
still use the math of a few things. That might do for a little
piece of the
system, like asking how much power it needs, but if you ask
about how to
make a huge chip compute or a huge network communicate, there
isn't yet an
Avogadro design theory.”
Neil is
completely right: there is not yet an Avogadro design theory.
Neil
is working to invent one, but that will be a very difficult
and probably
lengthy task. If anyone builds a nanofactory in the next five
or ten years,
it will have to be done with “the math of a few things.” But
how can this
math be applied to Avogadro numbers of parts?
Consider
this: Every second, 100,000,000 transistors in your computer
do
2,000,000,000 operations; there are 7,200 seconds in a two-hour
movie; so to
play a DVD, about 10^21 signal-processing operations have
to take place
flawlessly. That's pretty close to Avogadro territory. And
playing DVDs is
not simple. Those transistors are not doing the same thing
over and over;
they are firing in very complicated patterns, orchestrated
by the software.
And the software, of course, was written by a human.
How is
this possible, and why doesn't it contradict Neil? The answer
is that
computer engineering has had decades of practice in using
the “math of a few
things.” The people who design computer chips don't plan where
every one of
those hundred million transistors goes. They design at a much
higher level,
using abstractions to handle transistors in huge organized
collections of
collections. Remember that Neil talked about “complexity on
the scale of
thermodynamics.” But there is nothing complex about the collections
of
transistors. Instead, they are merely complicated.
The difference
between complication and complexity is important. Roughly
speaking, a system is complex if the whole is greater than
the sum of its
parts: if you can't predict the behavior that will emerge
just from knowing
the individual behavior of separated components. If a system
is not complex,
then the whole is equal to the sum of the parts. A straightforward
list of
features will capture the system's behavior. In a complicated
system, the
list gets longer, but no less accurate. Non-complex systems,
no matter how
complicated, can in principle be handled with the math of
a few things. The
complications just have to be organized into patterns that
are simple to
specify. The entire behavior of a chip with a hundred million
transistors
can be described in a single book. This is true even though
the detailed
design of the chip—the road map of the wires—would take thousands
of books
to describe.
Neil talked
about one other very important concept in [his article]. In
signaling, and in computation, it is possible to erase errors
by spending
energy. A computer could be designed to run for a thousand
years, or a
million, without a single error. There is a threshold of error
rates below
which the errors can be reliably corrected. Now we have the
clues we need to
see how to use the math of a few things to build complicated
non-complex
systems out of Avogadro numbers of parts.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gershenfeld03/gershenfeld_index.html
When I
was writing my paper on [“Design of a primitive nanofactory,”]
I did
calculations of failure rates. In order for quadrillions of
sub-micron
mechanisms to all work properly, they would have to have failure
rates of
about 10^-19. This is pretty close to (the inverse of) Avogadro's
number,
and is essentially impossible to achieve. The failure rate
from background
radiation is as high as 10^-4. However, a little redundancy
goes a long way.
If you build one spare mechanism for every eight, the system
will last
somewhat longer. This still isn't good enough; it turns out
you need seven
spares for every eight. And things are still small enough
that you have to
worry about radiation in the levels above, where you don't
have redundancy.
But adding spare parts is in the realm of the math of a few
things. And it
can be extended into a workable system.
http://www.jetpress.org/volume13/Nanofactory.htm#s8.5
The system
is built out of levels of levels of levels: each level is
composed of several similar but smaller levels. This quasi-fractal
hierarchical design is not very difficult, especially since
each level takes
only half the space of the next higher level. With many similar
levels, is
it possible to add a little bit of redundancy at each level?
Yes, it is, and
it works very well. If you add one spare part for every eight
at each level,
you can keep the failure rate as low as you like—with one
condition: the
initial failure rate at the smallest stage has to be below
3.2%. Above that
number, and one-in-eight redundancy won't help sufficiently—the
errors will
continue to grow. But if the failure rate starts below 3.2%,
it will
decrease at each higher redundant stage.
This analysis
can be applied to any system where inputs can be redundantly
combined. For example, suppose you are combining the output
of trillions of
small motors to one big shaft. You might build a tree of shafts
and gears.
And you might make each shaft breakable, so that if one motor
or collection
of motors jams, the other motors will break its shaft and
keep working. This
system can be extremely reliable.
There
is a limitation here: complex products can't be built this
way. In
effect, this just allows more efficient products to be built
in today's
design space. But that is good enough for a start: good enough
to rebuild
our infrastructure, powerful enough to build horrific weapons
in great
quantity, high-performance enough—even with the redundancy—to
give us access
to space; and generally capable of producing the mechanical
systems that
molecular manufacturing promises.
The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology(TM) (CRN) is
an affiliate of World Care(R), an international, non-profit,
501(c)3 organization. All donations to CRN are handled through
World Care. The opinions expressed by CRN do not necessarily
reflect those of World Care
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