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Biomorphic Software
CowboyRobot writes "From the molecular structure of spiders' silk to the efficient use of energy by insects and fish, we can learn many things from Nature and apply them to our engineering tasks.
One thing that nature is particularly good at is the development of dynamic, self-organizing systems.
Ken Lodding is a software engineer at NASA and is currently developing 'swarm algorithms for groups of wind-driven, remote exploratory vehicles'.
He has a six-page article at Queue on 'biologically inspired computing', how to develop 'algorithmic design concepts distilled from biological systems, or processes.'"
Prey is actually an interesting novel. The writing isn't as good as some of his previous novels, but from a technical perspective, I found it somewhat intriguing. It's barely plausible, like most sci-fi, but the elements that are plausible make you think.
If I remember correctly, the basic concept was that instead of trying to design algorithms for nanomachines, the programmers responsible for developing them just used a form of natural selection to 'evolve' an optimal algorithm. Of course, the problem was that because they didn't write the algorithm, they didn't fully understand it, so later on it turned out that it wasn't functioning as intended.
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Go look at QueryPerformanceCounter(). It'll give you a *very* high-res 64-bit timer (3579545 counts per second on my puter).
//60 FPS
That's what the DLL does. Sadly, Microsoft doesn't guarantee any sort of accuracy with that clock. Dual proc systems completely change the timing, too. My solution was to abstract out the timing into "ticks per second", then make the developer calculate for how long he wants between event. e.g.: frametime = timer.getTicksPerSecond()/60;
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The best approach that I've found is to have a single thread for all timer related activities and set its affinity so that it always runs on the same processor. It simply waits on a semaphore and updates a global timestamp variable every time you signal it. It can also signal other semaphores after a specific delay (getting there with enough resolution might involve a bit of busy waiting, but typically for less than 2ms).
The idea is not new, read the Turing's paper Intelligent Machinery about Pain & Pleasure machines. In short, machines behaves freely but are conditioned by two simple stimulus: 'pain' that forces behaviour to change, and 'pleasure' that stabilizes current behaviour.
What's in a sig?
The Encyclopedia at that link is nothing but the content from Wikipedia with added adverts (as they note in a tiny font at the bottom). In future, go to the source.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
That's Biomimicry and biomimicry.org, actually. But I agree, it's an excellent book. A real eye-opener.
Hmmm...seems to me the first use of the term "Biomporphing" was in scientist and SF writer Dr. Charles Pellegrino's 1998 ecological thriller "Dust," I wasn't aware that it has come into use. That was the term in the novel for synthetic life forms like Dinosaurs cloned from recovered DNA, but with modifications to make them smaller and more docile for use as house pets. "Dust" describes a meltdown of the global ecology, one of the symptoms of which is swarms of trillions of suddenly-carniverous Dust Mites that consume whole towns full of people (and animals). This may have inspired Crichton to try for the some of the same scares in his 2002 novel "Prey," although its physically impossible for Crichton's nanites to move as fast as they do in the novel (due to Reynold's number), no so for Dust Mites. It wouldn't be the first time Crichton has borrowed from Pellegrino, who wrote a speculative article on "Dinosaur World Park," a place filled with Dinosaurs cloned from DNA traces on insects in amber in a 1985 issue of Omni, which Crichton acknowledges inspired Jurrasic Park. Strangely enough, the novel "Dust" also features technologies based on spider silk grown from genetically modified corn silk. I wonder if the poster has read this novel? Great read if you're into hard SF and thrillers, BTW.
Ridiculous *and* physically impossible, as was mentioned on slashdot here:
Slashdot Article on PreyNanobots the size of Red Blood Cells (around 2-5 microns in length) would have a top speed of 2mm/sec in air by Dyson's calculation, or 7.2M/hour, hardly fodder for a high-speed chase!
By my quick calculation Dust Mites (about 200 microns in length), as I've mentioned in another post on this article, could travel up to 20cm/sec or 720M/hour, slow but still scary, especially if there's are trillons of them swarming (as in the novel "Dust"). And Dust Mites, like their fellow arachnids the spiders, can spin webs into parachutes and fly! I think spiderman has used that web-parachute trick, too. :-)