I am glad to see someone is starting to think for real about it.

A lot of the capabilities exist in separate research. Although possibly not in the labs that are working on this. So their could be some learning curve mastery of known processes and research that could take some time this year. Setup, procurement and funding could take time from this year. A fair amount of what is needed is clever integration and refinement. DNA synthesis of 32,000 bases has been around since 2004 and companies sell this service at a cost of about 70 cents to 2 dollars per base. Error rates are about 2 for 10,000. Movement of molecules and charge down nanowires has been done.

The funding amounts also are such that something would be expected to be delivered in about 2-3 years. If stuff is not completed then probably more money would need to be obtained to continue. I think the projects are properly sized and that useful (not necessarily complete) results will be possible in 2-3 years. Good luck to getting it executed.

A computer has perhaps two dozen levels of abstraction between the electrons and the screen. Each level is “simple”–that’s the point of it! So you can compare levels of nanomachine design to any level of computer design you like. I have gone so far as to compare billion-atom million-feature functional blocks to CPU machine language! (Which is about halfway between the electrons and the screen.)

I suspect that, when we start designing and building gram-scale atom-precise products, designers will want at most a few thousand options at each level. That implies at least eight levels of abstraction between the atom and the gram. I think it’ll actually be 15-20. And product designers will usually want to think about only two or three levels at a time, though good designers will be able to mentally encompass four or five when necessary.

Here’s an incomplete first draft:

Level 1: Reaction trajectories, potential energy surfaces.
2: Covalent structures: ball-and-stick diagrams.
3: Surface and volume structures. (Overlaps with 2 and 4.)
4: Lowest functional parts: gears, levers, wires…
5: Gearboxes, logic gates
6: Machines, circuits
7: Machine systems (e.g. assembly line, simple CPU)
8: Nanoblocks ~100 nm-1 micron
9: Nanoblock surface/volume structures; moving interfaces
10: Virtual materials (10-100 micron scale)
11: Human-interacting material properties (texture, appearance)
12: Detailed product form and function
13: Large-scale product form and function

Molecular manufacturing researchers will have to work from the bottom up in order to make these things possible. The software described here sounds like it’s intended to integrate levels 1-2. That will provide a solid foundation for designs at levels 3 and 4.

Product designers will have to start at high levels. Fortunately, even a few options at each level is enough to build the next higher level on. And above level 4, designers can think mechanically if they want to. So it shouldn’t take long, once large-scale hardware-building becomes available, to get a basic design capability all the way up to human-scale. Adding more options will make the product range broader and richer, but they can be filled in over time.

Of course, different applications will need different emphases in the levels. A micro-scale medical application may not use nanoblocks. A computer will have many levels of logic: gate, register, ALU, pipeline/microcode, chip, system.

Nanofactory control software will start at the highest level and go all the way to the lowest, by using pre-canned rules and recipes for decomposing pre-specified designs. So nanofactory control is really the opposite of the project described here. It’s like the difference between a machine language programmer and a chip designer.

Chris

one could imagine the abstraction of a higher order language built on top of this with concepts like macros, functions, procedure calls, loops, side effects etc all translated to their matter-equivalents.

It will take some effort not to conflate the terminology and to define the primitives in a manner that maintains their flexibility while still providing useful abstractions.

I wonder if you’d even want to share your first attempts with the world. The first working language of this type will immediately enable crafting a better and more elegant language. It may be worthwhile to keep it under wraps and release only at the nth generation where you’ve followed the evolution of computer languages and finally start to divurge. I bet this would happen very quickly once the first working protoype emerges.

neat stuff. I’ll be keeping an eye on this.