Logical N-AND Gate on a Molecular Turing Machine
This work addresses the problem of implementing universal logic gates in molecular computing, which could enable new forms of biological or nanoscale computation, though it appears incremental as it adapts existing concepts to a molecular context.
The authors designed a molecular Turing machine that computes the logical NAND function on binary strings of arbitrary length, using a mathematical abstraction of operations on double-stranded DNA and a molecular encoding for input symbols.
In Boolean algebra, it is known that the logical function that corresponds to the negation of the conjunction --NAND-- is universal in the sense that any other logical function can be built based on it. This property makes it essential to modern digital electronics and computer processor design. Here, we design a molecular Turing machine that computes the NAND function over binary strings of arbitrary length. For this purpose, we will perform a mathematical abstraction of the kind of operations that can be done over a double-stranded DNA molecule, as well as presenting a molecular encoding of the input symbols for such a machine.