Team uses groupware to build nanocomputer on the Net

                                        By R. Colin Johnson

                    RICHMOND, Va. -- An ad hoc group of scientists that includes
                    at least one Nobel-prize winner has come together on the Internet
                    to build the world's first nanocomputer using groupware in
                    cyberspace. The professed goal of the "Nanocomputer Dream
                    Team" is to build, by the year 2011, a computer that's essentially
                    made out of molecules--one "grown" from tiny adding machines
                    that consist of just hundreds of atoms. 

                    So far, the Dream Team has amassed the brainpower of 200
                    working engineers and scientists, all of whom volunteer on one of
                    seven subcommittees attacking specific tasks involved in
                    designing and building a nanocomputer prototype. The work,
                    proceeding in the patent-free public domain, aims at a new kind of
                    computer that's based on molecular, rather than electronic
                    principles. 

                    "The Nanocomputer Dream Team is a nonprofit Internet
                    organization with the mission of building the first
                    nanocomputer--or at least a close second," said Darrell Parfitt,
                    captain of the project's Red team, which is evaluating logic
                    models, from molecular "rod" logic to quantum-dot automata. 

                    The other teams are Yellow, the "brainstorming" team, charged
                    with problem formulation and solution; Green, for physical
                    hardware construction; Blue, for blueprint design; the Purple
                    "Molecular Modeling" team for visual and chemical analysis; the
                    Orange "Net Supercomputing" team to coordinate distributed
                    computing resources; and the White "PR" team for media and
                    information coordination. 

                    Any engineer can sign on to participate in the on-line design
                    process via a Web page. In the past, online forums have revealed
                    an ability to settle standards and engineering-practice questions
                    orders of magnitude faster than traditional committees. For
                    example, the quick finalization of the virtual-reality modeling
                    language was defined by Internet groups. 

                    The Nanocomputer Dream Team was originally conceived when
                    Bill Spence, the founder of Nanotechnology Magazine, accepted a
                    $100 bet that such a computer could not be made in the next 15
                    years. Now, "Take a look at the membership page and you will see
                    that it is slowly becoming a virtual who's who in this rapidly
                    expanding field," said Michael McDonald, captain of the Yellow
                    team. 

                    Among the members are Dr. Richard Smalley of Rice University,
                    who recently won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering
                    Buckminsterfullerene, a new form of carbon, and Dr. Kenneth
                    Cox, the assistant to the directorate of engineering at NASA-JSC. 

                    "Our volunteers come from every area of engineering, computer
                    programming, software design, psychology and public relations,"
                    said the Red Team's Parfitt, a professor at Virginia
                    Commonwealth University here. 

                    McDonald--who founded the NASA-JSC Area Nanotechnology
                    Study Group as a local addendum to the Nanocomputer Dream
                    Team--says the rate at which engineers and scientists are signing
                    up reminds him of his early days as a NASA engineer, when there
                    was a lot of doubt voiced about the space agency's plan to put a
                    man on the moon. 

                    "When I was an engineer for Control Data Corp. at NASA in
                    Houston, all my friends used to tell me we were crazy if we
                    thought we would ever get to the moon," said McDonald. "None
                    of us at the time knew all the answers, but we all came together in
                    a spirit of harmony and accomplished the unthinkable." 

                    Some teams have fewer members than others and need more
                    volunteers. "I am currently looking for experts in rod logic, fuzzy
                    logic, reversible logic, gear logic and helical logic in order to get a
                    broad enough base of expertise so that every aspect of
                    nanocomputer logic design will be within the competency of the
                    team," said Red-team leader Parfitt. 

                    Rod logic, as it sounds, uses interlocking molecular rodlike shapes
                    to define binary states as a basis for nanometer-size adding
                    machines. 

                    Another avenue is fractal shape-changing robots, a
                    microtechnology developed by Robodyne Cybernetics, a
                    London-based company that "uses shape-shifting robots to make
                    almost any object that can be imagined,'' Parfitt said. 

                    Just as computer art is composed of 2-D pixels, fractal robots are
                    composed of 3-D cubes -- thousands of them, from those
                    measuring 1 meter on a side for creating building-size robots to
                    those measuring 1 cubic micron for delicate eye-surgery robots.
                    Robots are constructed in any shape by linking an appropriate
                    configuration of cubes. 

                    The inside of each cube is hollow, so that other cubes can be
                    contained within it. All the electronics and electromechanical parts
                    are contained in the cubes' faces, which are identical except for
                    size. Each face contains its own microprocessor and electrical
                    interconnection to adjacent cubes. For automatic
                    self-configuration, each cube face also has four stepper motors
                    with pinion gears driving four linear screw gears along each face's
                    edge. 

                    Fractal robotic cubes can reconfigure themselves not only into
                    physical structures, such as emergency housing for earthquake
                    victims, but also into different computer architectures. For
                    instance, micrometer-size cubes could arrange microprocessors
                    in, say, a hypercube architecture. 

                    Robodyne's promised OS for its robots would enable any imagined
                    configuration of cubes to create both computer architectures and
                    physical shapes by merely reloading new software. At the atomic
                    level, software offers a unique physical flexibility.