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.'"

Comments

Not quite the same thing, but...

[AKAImBatman]

...related, is the practice of having a program interrogate its environment. Some of the most successful programs are highly portable pieces of code that check to see what OS services are available, what APIs are available, what dependency software is available, etc. and then constructs the final object tree based on the results.

While this is very difficult to do in C/C++, it's a very successful way of writing Java code. For example, a gaming timer I wrote first checks the JVM version. If it's on 1.5 it uses the new NANOTimer. If that fails, it checks the OS. If it's on Windows, it then checks for the presence of a native timer DLL. (Timing on Windows sucks.) If it fails to find and/or load the DLL, it then falls back to a clever algorithm for making the most of default Windows timing. If it's on some other OS, it uses the default timer (all OSes except windows can provide millisecond resolution without complaint).

This is the way forward

[Anonymous Coward]

Mark Tilden has noticed that machines that mimic biology take a lot less computation resources than machines that are strictly programmed.

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Mark%2 0T ilden

Trying to strictly control everything doesn't work well past a certain level of complexity. It's like capitalism vs communism or Cathedral vs Bazaar. I expect to see a lot more of this kind of project in the future.

Re:Predator or Prey?

[no longer myself]

How is this any scarier than "self-sustaining, swarms, of tiny" insects? Nature still has some of the scariest arsenals known to man. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find any mechination of man's that isn't handled better than those found in nature. We just haven't discovered effective ways of harnessing them.

Mild example: Did you know that a goldfish can see infrared radiation? That fish can see warm bodies through the walls in your house, and perhaps even the neighbor's house. But it takes some pretty sophisticated equipment for a human to achieve that end. Good thing that fish don't talk. ;-)