I heard Luca Cardelli, who's also worked on programming languages and typing systems, give this talk. He gives an overview of the programming language technology to program biological matters. This field has been brewing for a decade or so, but it's now seemingly acquired critical mass.
Nanotechnology is more general as it pertains to all manipulation of matter on an atomic, molecular, and supramolecular scale. Cardelli's work is primarily geared towards DNA-based mechanisms.
The research hypothesis is that the programming languages Cardelli develops do a reasonable job, and there are examples where they have delivered better predictions than differential equation based approaches.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 22.2 ms ] threadDeeply fascinating.
Can someone articulate the relationship between this concept (molecular programming) and 'nanotechnology'?
For legos, language does a bad job of describing geometric structures. A 3D modeling tool serves as a better interface in this case.
For molecules it's weirder. I'm not sure how it would work in terms of proteins or dna.