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.

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