Re: Nanotech control systems (was Re: Transhuman Beach Party)

Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Thu, 9 Sep 1999 01:17:03 -0700 (PDT)

On Wed, 8 Sep 1999, Matt Gingell wrote:

>
> I think this is a fascinating question. I don't have the chemistry
> background to evaluate claims about the mechanical possibility of
> nanomachines,

I'd suggest you look in the mirror, for that is what *you* are. The *only* real question regarding nanomachines, is *how* difficult is "hard/dry" (diamondoid/sapphire) nanotech vs. "soft/wet" (protein/DNA/organic molecule) nanotech.

> but it seems to me that actually building one may
> well be an easier problem than writing the software.

I disagree from the perspective that a huge part of nanotech will be nothing but repetition of the same movements, parts, etc. There is very little software involved in most applications of nanotechnology (though there may be lots of applications in creating and verifying the designs).

> How on earth do you coordinate the behavior of trillions of
> automata with micrometer precision in a noisy, constantly
> changing environment, without any finely-grained way of determining
> position?

The problem of designing a complex nanomachine with a trillion atoms and verifying it is harder than assembling it. That is because the verification will almost certainly be a "proof" that it will work. The assembly methods could be "directed" as semiconductor lithography or MEMS now is or as "simple" as having the device "self-assemble" from small sub-components (as things do in biology). Now you certainly could design a device that would be difficult to assemble, in that you could not reach the place where you needed to put the last atom, but that would be a poor design. The design has to incorporate the assembly technology just as all machines do today.

As far as communication in "noisy" environments go, that is very solvable. Your assembly instructions can be "tapped" in on an isolated set of diamond/buckytube/etc "communication rods". So long as the signal on the line, which can be very high, exceeds vibration from surrounding activities, you will always get reliable information.

> How do you deal with the problem of mutation?
Mutation of what? Your assembly instructions? These have ECC (Error Correction Codes) in the host computer and potentially in the transmission. You simply increase the size of the ECC code until the error rate gets low enough that the assembly must be reliable.

If you are dealing with the problem of an atomic reaction that didn't work, you can have "detection & correction" machines (just as DNA polymerase does in cells), or as I think Eric points out in Nanosystems you have "stop-on-error" built into the nanoassembly process. You should be able to detect whether the reactions occured properly based on the mass of the thing left on your assembler tip, the heat produced by the reaction, etc. You also can go back and scan the assembled device with either an AFM or an electron beam.

With most small parts you can verify they went together properly simply by weighing them. Since we have atomic mass resolution for weights, even a single atom missing shows up as a big error. For example, most biotech labs today routinely do separations of small DNA fragments (~20 bases) that are missing a base using a technique called chromatography. The entire art of DNA sequencing is based on the separation of DNA fragments that differ in size by a single base. If the small subassemblies are "perfect", and only "perfect" assembly of larger structures is possible (i.e. jig-saw puzzle assemblies), then that pretty much implies that you get perfect larger assemblies as well.

> It seems to me that the shear number of nanites, moles of them
> on a large project, make undetected corruptions inevitable.

For most large structures, i.e. like "nanolegos" for building macro-scale "active" houses, the structure is going to be highly regular and so there will be a tolerable defect level. Defect containing materials may not be as strong or as fast or as pretty. But they will still significantly outperform current materials. If Hal wants the "Crystal" champagne style mansion (i.e. perfect), it takes longer to build than if he is willing to settle for the "Budweiser" Beer style mansion. But you and I looking at it, will probably be unable to notice the difference. Humans probably contain a *huge* number of assembly errors (a mole, birthmark, etc. would be an examples of those we can easily observe) but most of them are hardly noticable and have a very low impact on the functioning of the machine.

>
> We can't get a the new air traffic control system right, or even
> manage to get baggage delivered correctly at Denver's new airport,
> and these are 'Hello World' compared to what nanotech would
> require. And calling this stuff 'safety critical' doesn't really convey
> the magnitude of the worst case scenario.

True, but we can for the most part get airplanes "right". It would appear, that the problem may be dealing with large complex special cases. If we are going to build a lot of them or are willing to throw away a lot of nonfunctional parts (as nature does), then I think we can get it right. There is probably a good argument for building your nano-house before your nano-aircar because the failures probably pose less risk. Unfortunately the nano-aircar does more for you so it will probably come first. Fortunately they will be able to do a lot of self-test-flying and they have good failure modes (multiple parachutes), so the risk is probably fairly low.

Once we have designs that can be built and are reliable we will continue to improve on them. But unless the simulations are really perfect, there will be things that don't work. The first diesel engine blew up, but it worked well enough to convince people that it was worth funding the development of a better model.

>
> I think it's fair to say that the development of software engineering
> processes has lagged eons behind machine advances and, more
> importantly, the growth in complexity of the systems we want to
> build.

Yes. It is interesting that we can build very complex machines that function quite well but cannot build complex sequences of instructions that function equivalently well. Is this a problem with simply testing and software failure modes or is it something else?

>
> I recently got to visit Cray Research in Eagen, Minnesota, and was taken
> on a tour of the machine room.
Cool! I'm jealous.

> They run SETI at home at a low priority, so when sales isn't trying to
> optimize a potential customer's Fortran they're all searching for signal.

Such a waste, I need to go give them a lecture on the impact of nanotechnology on the development of ET and how evolving nanomachinery would be the coolest application of that unused horsepower.

Robert