Posts by SVETTER@MMEI.COM

Nanotronics just announced a new feature added to their atomically-precise 3-D microscope. They also announced the Eric Drexler joined their advisory board. I take the latter as a pretty firm endorsement that they are on the critical path to APM. Here is a link to a brief article about it:

http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2015/04/24/nanotronics-imaging-introduces-nvisible™-virtual-reality-technology-enabling-3d-virtual-e#axzz3YNGZNk7A

Steve

Steven C. Vetter

President, Molecular Manufacturing Enterprises, Inc.

4105 Countryview Drive

Eagan, MN 55123

SVetter@MMEI.com

(651) 285-4299

It was twenty years ago that I participated in the discussions on this, so my memory may be a bit cloudy, but I seem to remember that the original intent was to require rotations as well. It does say "...controlled motions needed to manipulate and assemble individual atoms or molecules into larger structures, with atomic precision", and as Drexler elaborates in Nanosystems, and subsequent simulations from Merkle and others show, that often requires rotations. IMO, it should say 6 DOF explicitly, but you are correct that it does not.

I do see that I misremembered the full adder. It is supposed to add two 8-bit numbers, not 4-bit numbers. So, that would take 15 half-adders, not 7. I don't know why it says to discard the overflow. It seems trivial to include it, and that makes the module much more useful. But, the task is simply to demonstrate construction capability, not to build an actually useful device, so that is of minor consequence.

Steven C. Vetter

President, Molecular Manufacturing Enterprises, Inc.

4105 Countryview Drive

Eagan, MN 55123

SVetter@MMEI.com

(651) 285-4299

(Sorry to spam). As to the question of when the prize will be claimed, I invite you all to take the pole I just posted on this, and related questions.

Steve

Steven C. Vetter

President, Molecular Manufacturing Enterprises, Inc.

4105 Countryview Drive

Eagan, MN 55123

SVetter@MMEI.com

(651) 285-4299

While this is off-topic, I think Jim deserves recognition and the huge THANK YOU! for moderating sci-nanotech for so long, and even more so, for voluntarily setting up this web version. I for one am looking forward to reinvigorating these discussions.

Thank you, Jim.

Steve

Steven C. Vetter

President, Molecular Manufacturing Enterprises, Inc.

4105 Countryview Drive

Eagan, MN 55123

SVetter@MMEI.com

(651) 285-4299

On the issue of DNA origami being sufficient to claim the prize, the short answer is unfortunately "no".

The closest I've seen to anyone potentially claiming the prize was in 2000 when James Ellenbogen presented a molecular electronics design of a half-adder*. I immediately realized the potential. I remember saying to Ralph Merkle right after the talk "Well, just build seven of those and half the grand prize is done!" [A half-adder adds two one-bit numbers; seven of them is sufficient to add two 4-bit numbers; the criteria for the adder portion of the Grand Prize.] Unfortunately, I believe they ran into various challenges of fanout, signal integrity, scale up, etc. and never quite realized the potential that appeared to be there. Also, the intent of the grand prize is to foster development of MNT, which arguably a molecular electronics approach does not directly do. Still, it seems to be to be a potential avenue to at least keep in mind. If nothing else, any success of (or close to) atomically-precise, bottom-up construction could be a real boon to the overall effort.

Steve

* http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl…l.jsp%3Farnumber%3D838115
(signup required to view full article)

Steven C. Vetter

President, Molecular Manufacturing Enterprises, Inc.

4105 Countryview Drive

Eagan, MN 55123

SVetter@MMEI.com

(651) 285-4299

Will, I believe the answer is "all three". Having been the FI Treasurer for a couple years, then the BOD Secretary, has provided me with a bit of insight into the problems. Unfortunately of course, the details are privileged information that I cannot share. However, I agree that a way should be found to increase this fund. I will say that a couple years ago we made a change in the way this fund was managed which should help a bit, but it is far from completely addressing the issues. For one thing, the rules and regulations governing a non-profit administrating a fund like this puts serious "hand cuffs" on what can be done.

At one point there were in-depth discussions with the X-Prize people (Peter Diamandis et al), which if they had bared fruit would have of course addressed all three issues Will mentioned. The upshot of this exercise was that a successful X-Prize should have a goal that meets a few basic criteria:

1. Easily stated / understood by a large cross-section of the public.
2. Be attainable within a very few years.

In addition, it is very helpful (but not requirement) for it to have "obvious" "practical" applications / benefits.

It was felt that the Feynman grand prize did not meet these criteria well enough to pursue it as an X-Prize in the foreseeable future. In my opinion, there may be room for defining a prize that would better meet these criteria while still maintaining the fundamental goal of promoting MNT. In any case, as progress is made, we will naturally get closer to meeting these criteria with time. There may be a critical time when we are close enough, but not yet there, that reopening the X-Prize discussions will be worthwhile.

Steve

Steven C. Vetter

President, Molecular Manufacturing Enterprises, Inc.

4105 Countryview Drive

Eagan, MN 55123

SVetter@MMEI.com

(651) 285-4299

Chris,

In general, I like your idea. (At a meta level, I like that you are always coming up with innovative ideas, as well.) However, while I admit I have not done the detailed calculations, scaling as the cube works both ways of course. My intuition is that the net magnetic moments at scales of a few nm would be too feeble / unreliable to be practical. As Jim alluded to, the electrostatic forces would I suspect overwhelm the magnetic forces at that scale. The volatility of magnetic domains that small could also be a problem. Perhaps a quick calculation of the hysteresis of a magnetic domain at that scale compared with, say, one kT of energy would be worthwhile.

Steve

Steven C. Vetter

President, Molecular Manufacturing Enterprises, Inc.

4105 Countryview Drive

Eagan, MN 55123

SVetter@MMEI.com

(651) 285-4299