Modern computers aren’t powerful enough to handle the Pentagon’s most complex models and simulations, so the department is looking to nature for a new solution.
On Aug. 1, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency kicked off a research initiative that looks to harness the computational power of living cells, chemical bonds and other natural processes to develop more efficient computers. Participants in the program, called Nature as Computer or NAC, will rapidly explore a wide array of computational processes found in the natural world and prototype systems that can mimic them in a lab.
In the years ahead, the most promising projects could spin off into their own full-fledged DARPA programs, with the potential transforming aviation, robotics, nanomaterials and an untold number of other fields, according to NAC Program Manager Jiangying Zhou.
“We're trying to learn from the mechanisms nature is using and then engineer materials to mimic that process,” Zhou said in a conversation with Nextgov. “A lot of those [computational] feasibilities are already established by the research community. NAC is pushing us to go one step further, saying, ‘OK, now all these are possible. Can they be used to solve really hard problems?’”
The NAC program seeks to address the same fundamental challenge that’s fueling the government’s quantum computing research: the silicon-based, binary computers that exist today aren’t equipped to solve the complex problems the U.S. faces today. Using classical computers to simulate nuclear detonations, model air turbulence or predict other intricate physical processes consumes a significant amount of time, money and hardware, which even the Pentagon can’t always afford.
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