Author: Bruce Cleaver
Date: 07:57:57 01/26/00
Hi All. Not the usual fare for chess "computing" but interesting. From the URL http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/01/000126080913.htm Princeton University researchers have developed a kind of computer that uses the biological molecule RNA to solve complex problems. The achievement marks a significant advance in molecular computing, an emerging field in which scientists are harnessing molecules such as DNA and RNA to solve certain problems more efficiently than could be done by conventional computing. In work to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Princeton scientists used a test tube containing 1,024 different strands of RNA to solve a simple version of the "knight problem," a chess puzzle that is representative of a class of problems that requires brute-force computing. The knight problem asks how many and where can one place knights on a chessboard so they can not attack each other. For the purposes of their experiment, the researchers restricted the board to just nine squares, so there were 512 possible combinations. Of these, the RNA computer correctly identified 43 solutions.
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