Organic Computers

Welcome to OLEDs and AMOLEDs! the era where organics and electronics have started merging is here. Long ago in the early 90s when Robin Cook wrote the medical thriller titled "Brain" he suggested the use of the human brain as the processor for a computer, this he believed would be the ultimate artificial intelligence. It might have been too progressive then, but today it looks like organic computing is going to be a reality in the near future. There is already deicated research on this front, the most notable is SPP1183 of the Greman Research Foundation (DFG). Also a lot of papers have been published on this topic by researchers, the most important being Christian Muller-Schloer's "On feasibility of controlled emergence".



Let me examine this domain of computing in more detail, lets see the need for organic computing, the advantages and the disadvantages.



The need: The electronic devices have a limit upto which they can be compressed, this limit is goverened by the heat in the electronic circuit. The more we try to compress the circuit the closer the parts would get; and as each part emitts a certain level of heat, when bringing two parts close together the amount of heat they emitt limits their proximity. So, if we brought two circuit components that emitt a lot of heat, like transistors too close the resultant would be the heat each of the tranisistors emitt would add up and cause a hot spot on the circut which could melt the entire circuit. Now a lot of research is being done on semiconductors and inorganic substances to overcome this difficulty. One of the earliest solutions proposed was using light to send signals instead of elecritcity, this was called opto-electronics. However, the cost of such circuits went through the roof as they needed very high quality semiconductors to convert the light signals to electric power which is needed to perform any activity outside the circuit, like turning a relay on or off. Hence, this did not fly too much.

The second solution is seen all around us: organic communication, a small insect like a bee can actually read mega bytes of data about its environment and process it and take corrective action. How many megawatts do you think a bee would consume? a fraction of a watt could be a correct estimate using the Joules to watts conversion. As its energy consumption is very little the heat generated by it is also very very small. Our brain would form the next examplar solution too, we process atleast a trillion instructions per minute ( may be a billion i am not sure of this figure) we store data as much as a million data centres would store, most important of all we store knowledge, which is differentiated from data by its ability to provide instructions to react to any external stimulus. How many watts does our brain consume??? How much heat does our brain disperse? How much cooling and space do we need for our brain.



This makes a strong argument for organic computers. No I dont want your brain as my CPU. All I am saying is a low powered organic processor which could handle tons of data and instructions could be made at a fraction of the cost of a data centre or a supercomputer, could be biodegradable, could be eco friendly, could be very small and consume a 100th of the power todays computers are consuming.



The Potential: The abilities of organic computers are almost endless. We need not have a full organic computer to begin with we could always begin with a screen of OLEDs and a completely inorganic CPU and all other components. Later maybe we can tune our systems to read from organic material hard disks, which could store a 100s of terra bytes and would be of the size of our palm, whats more if disk space gets full? We could add a new organic layer to the same disk and boost its memory, or even better we could ask the disk to grow by itself........ kinda cool huh? Then maybe we could solve the RAM by adding organic RAM, 100TB RAM anyone???



More so today we talk of clusters of computers trying to process millions of instructions, provide us with real time data, render complex graphic videos etc. Think of these in an organic environment we would need only a hand full of servers one of them could be made a kind of captain which would recieve all requests and intelligently decide which server would react to what request. Just like a cricket match where the captain views the conditions of the game and selects his bowlers. This could be the long standing solution to distributed AI over large server systems.



These systems could be flexible and be either highly customized or provide multi-dimentional functionality, like a hot blonde's system can be trained to be higly optimized to get music and video content from the net the other fuctions could be not so fast or optimal, likewise a geeky phsyics scientist could have his computer tuned to meet his physics modelling requirements on the top and other requirements like social networking could be tuned in as secondary functionality.



These are just some examples of its potential, more of these could be quoted but let me keep my blog posting short.



The Social Context: The progress of our race is always limited by the amount of information we are able to interchange. As cavemen we drew cave paintings, as we progressed we invented language, syntax, grammar etc. Today we have the internet that sends billions of KB of data every day to every corner of the earth. Tomorrow if we could make the billions of bytes into trillions or i dont know the numbers above that then imagine the information we could share and the quantum leaps our human race can make in its progress. live 3D streaming, living in a virtual world are just things to start with...... The bounds are endless.



The challenges: Degradation is the biggest challenge with anything organic, as time progresses its functioning will become slow and it will eventually degrade beyond use. So the data that we store could be lost, the processors have to be replaced periodically, the monitors have to be purchased a fresh. That is as of today. We could go ahead a build organic components that could last a life time, that could last may be as long as we live, or we could make organic devices that are growing old to pass on the information and processing capablities to newer younger organic devices.



Homogenous response to stimulii: This is the next biggest challenge in the face of organic computing. As we know different organic elements react in different ways to the same stimulus. like light may attract moths and the same the light may chase away roaches. So a completely organic system would have to be controlled to react in the same manner to different stimulii.



External environment affecting the working of computers. The next time we may not have to worry about a software virus or bug, we may have to worry about real viruses and bacteria that can affect the functioning of our machines, by destroying some ploymer structure etc....



In retrospect: The future of use of organic devices in electronic circuits is only bound to grow. The uses of organic devices can be endless, and we can also have various advantages these devices provide us with. On the flip side a live organic terminator.................... ??