Technology Review recently had an article on a project named MAYA where DNA has been “programmed” to play the game of tic-tac-toe. Up until now, most DNA computing projects have been about throwing DNA at solving really large problems, such as the travelling salesman problem or similar tasks.
While indeed extremely cool, I don’t see a big difference between this task and others previously solved with DNA computing. Tic-tac-toe is a closed and actually very small, determined game. The travelling salesman problem for about 5 cities is a more complex task than playing a perfect game of tic-tac-toe.
The fluorescent molecule to indicate the game-to-be-played is still a nice twist!
Links:
The MAYA project’s official website (not too informing though – probably more DNA than HTML done in this lab)
