RE: design complexity of assemblers (was: Ramez Naam: redesigning children)

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Fri Nov 29 2002 - 08:32:46 MST


On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Ramez Naam wrote:

> From: Peter C. McCluskey [mailto:pcm@rahul.net]
> > mez@apexnano.com (Ramez Naam) writes:
> > >2) Assemblers make and break chemical bonds.
> >
> > For pure diamondoid systems, people who try to model this
> > plan to mainly use the Brenner Potential,
>
> Yes, but the bonds assemblers will be making and breaking will not be
> pure diamondoid.

I think both Peter and Ramez need to be more specific.

Most "diamondoid" "parts" are based on very strong covalent bonds.

Only the interaction between different parts is based on
non-covalent bonds -- i.e. a bearing spinning within a
housing (one carbon nanotube spinning or sliding within
another).

There are two very different questions -- can a part be
assembled -- and will a part "work" (or how long will
it work under specific conditions) once it has been
assembled?

> Goodness. If the kind of control you are aiming for is the degree of
> control virus authors have over their creations, then we have a very
> very different idea of what responsible development methodologies for
> assemblers are.

If we use internet as an example, then we should assume
the worst and place a very high emphasis on the development
of nano-defence systems.

The thing that enables DOS attacks is the fact that we think
DOS attacks are not possible (how many people would normally allow
their computers to become infected with a virus that allows
DOS attacks to occur?)

Robert



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:29 MST