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CS 881 Course Homepage (Fall 1996)

CS 881a -- Topics in Computing and Biology: DNA Computing is a senior graduate level course offered from September to December 1996 in the department of computer science at the University of Western Ontario. More details about the course are available from the document entitled What is CS 881 about?. If you are looking for general resources about DNA or molecular computing then the list of course resources may help you.

The remainder of this document is given over to contributions made by the students attending the course. These contributions currently include copies of handouts from course presentations and some of the questions raised during those presentations. Essay answers to the final exam and other material might be included later.

Course presentations

Students are required to lead one seminar each. Links to the three handouts appear here:

Encoding Methods for DNA Computers

Presented on 29 October 1996 by J. Blustein

In Postscript® format (120kb)

Using DNA Algorithms to Solve NP-complete Problems

Presented on 5 November 1996 by Charlotte Miller

Error rates in DNA Computing

Presented on 3 December 1996 by Kris Langohr

New version (10 January 1997)

Issues raised in presentations

We haven't answered all of the questions that have arisen during our presentations so we want to keep them in mind. Here are the three most interesting ones:

• Should we use DNA only for storage, i.e. use something else for computing?
• Is our model of computing too perfect to be implemented by DNA computers?
• Dare we ignore the space complexity of proposed algorithms?

See Also

This document is technically part of J. Blustein's list of scholarly resources. You might find some of the other resources interesting. Links to presentations from other classes are available from my list of resources for CS 881.

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~jamie/.Refs/Courses/CS881/index.html

This document is copyright by its author, J. Blustein.