The autistic children had on average 67 percent more neurons — a type of brain cell and a fundamental building block of the nervous system — than boys without autism of a similar age.

Mother Nature follows the principle of redundancy by selecting a simple mechanism or module as a building block for a complex system and then using that module over and over again in other systems.

Mariantoni's group has used the new system to run an algorithm that is a kind of computational building block, called a Toffoli gate, which can be used to implement any conventional computer program.