industry & research
campusreview.com.au
“In such a world, we would all have the
creativity of Van Gogh, we could all be
millionaires on the stock market, we could
know the future of human civilisation, we
could find our perfect match in love. We
would be demigods, basically.
“Obviously, such a world is extremely
difficult to imagine, but perhaps, more
modestly, along the way to such a place,
we’d learn a lot about computation, life and
our place and meaning in the world.”
From a more immediate perspective,
Nicolau says the problem of how long it
was taking a computer to wade through
extreme amounts of data kept cropping up
in different guises.
In part it was due to a computer’s inability
to accept imperfection, just like in choosing
the perfect love match.
“For example, when drugs for medical
treatment are created, we have to accept
they do not always perfectly bind and
therefore do not always work, or only work
on some people,” he says.
“We have to accept sub-optimal
sometimes – that’s life – but we cannot
have the same attitude to things like cyber
security, nuclear codes or aeroplane design.
“These we need to be perfect and so
we need our computers to be up to the
challenge.”
According to Nicolau, much of what
society calls ‘intelligence’ or ‘reasoning’
reduces to solving an NP-complete problem
called ‘satisfiability’ – SAT.
“Whether it’s scheduling meetings,
finding a mate or creating art, all roads flow
through SAT. My project aims to design
bio-computers that can carry out reasoning
tasks like this and also to bring this nascent
technology back to Australia, where it was
conceived. Our microscopic bio-computer
has proved it is capable of working in parallel
to do a hard problem, like a millipede
moving all its legs at the same time.”
This is achieved through a combination of
the properties of living things (multitasking)
with the best of technology (precision).
“And besides helping us solve real-world
problems, what we learn from creating
these bio-computers may also help us think
We need our universities ...
to support risky but potentially
world-changing technologies.
about profound theoretical/metaphysical
questions, like P versus NP, the deepest
problem in all of mathematics and, arguably,
all of science.
“If Australia is to be and remain a world
leader in research, we need our universities
and funding bodies to support risky but
potentially world-changing technologies,
and it is wonderful to see the ARC and QUT
doing just that here.
“Right now, we are quietly confident; the
biocomputers are getting better fast, but can
we keep the party going? We’ll see.” ■
19