Alternative computing models
"Despite the massive gains in speed and capacity over the history of the digital computer, there are many tasks for which current computers are inadequate. For some of these tasks, conventional computers are fundamentally inadequate, because the time taken to find a solution grows very quickly as the size of the problem to be solved expands. Therefore, there has been research interest in some computer models that use biological processes, or the oddities of quantum physics, to tackle these types of problems. For instance, DNA computing is proposed to use biological processes to solve certain problems. Because of the exponential division of cells, a DNA computing system could potentially tackle a problem in a massively parallel fashion. However, such a system is limited by the maximum practical mass of DNA that can be handled.
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