When Does the Computer Stop Calculating?
Thomas Dandekar, Meik Kunz · Bioinformatics · 2023
The question of when a bioinformaticsBioinformatics problem will be completed is difficult to answer for problems with built-in combinatoricsCombinatorics. Alan Turing generally modeled all computable problems using the Turing machineTuring machines, an idealized abstract computer. All non-Turing computable problems cannot be solved by computers and remain tasks for humans. Many particularly interesting problems in bioinformaticsBioinformatics are NP (nondeterministic polynomial complexityPolynomial complexity) problems, such as protein structure predictionProtein Structure Predictions and most network and signal computation or image processing. In general, more powerful computers, the bundling of many computer nodesComputer nodes (parallelisation) and application-specific chipsApplication Specific Chips can also directly increase computer performance, for example with omicsOmics data.