DNA plays Tic-Tac-Toe

Hjalmar Gislason — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 23:00:00 +0000

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)

hjalli.com - Hjálmar Gíslason » DNA computing

DNA plays Tic-Tac-Toe