Impressive as today’s supercomputers are, they remain “Turing machines”: processors that perform the kinds of mathematical operations that humans can do, albeit exponentially faster and on a massive scale. Turing machines have particular limitations: there are computations that they cannot perform. However, biocomputing may not suffer these constraints. It is highly likely that bacterial networks can be encouraged to self-organise into arrangements that compute in ways that go beyond traditional Boolean logic implementations, and beyond what Turing machines can achieve.

These computations will inspire new, supra-Turing models of computation and information processing and may lead to an era of “cellular supremacy”, where biological networks solve problems that are intractable to traditional computation models.¹² It may also be possible to create “hybrid” architectures that interface cellular systems with traditional silicon-based computers, creating a different form of computational advantage.¹³ The ability to compute in the presence of noise, and with analogue signals, may also give biology an edge over digital Turing machines.