Abstract

: We show how to use DNA experiments to solve the famous "SAT" problem of Computer Science. This is a special case of a more general method that can solve NP-complete problems, first introduced in [3]. The advantage of these results is the huge parallelism inherent in DNA based computing. It has the potential to yield vast speedups over conventional electronic based computers for such search problems. 1. Introduction In a recent breakthrough Adleman [1] showed how to use biological experiments to solve instances of the famous Hamiltonian Path Problem (HPP). Recall that this problem is: Given a set of "cities" and directed paths between them; Find a directed tour that starts at a given city, ends at a given city, and visits every other city exactly once. This problem (HPP) is known to be NP-complete [2]. A computational problem is in NP provided it can be formulated as a "search" problem. Further, a problem is NP-complete provided, if it has an efficient solution, then so does all of ...

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