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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.'"
Sounds an awful lot like Michael Crichton's novel Prey. The story's description (from the above link): cloud of nanoparticles -- micro-robots -- has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive. It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolving swiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour. Every attempt to destroy it has failed. And we are the prey.
I hoped that this was more fiction than reality. Perhaps Prey is going to become a movie and they are writing this up to get people interested?
Doesn't the thought of an intelligent swarm of nearly indestructible particles scare people? I know I am paranoid and all but I can't fathom the damage that could occur if these got out and were self-sustaining even for a short time.
All we need is wild packs of stray 'exploratory vehicles' rummaging through the garbage at night.
10 SWIM AROUND TANK
20 PRINT "LOOK A ROCK!"
30 GOTO 10
...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).
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
After all its just an attempt to reproduce human though and decision making processes in machines.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I read things like this and can't help but thing about some alien engineers coming to earth, deciding that they don't have time to explore it properly, and plop down some solar powered "robots" to gather some data on the planet. A few millenia pass and some more alien engineers come by, having the same idea but being jerks, deciding to make "robots" that eat the solar powered "robots".
Jerks.
how to develop 'algorithmic design concepts distilled from biological systems, or processes.'
Does this mean we can expect the whole dating-and-mating process to be reduced to an algorythm? Does the average slashdotter now have reason to have hope to apsire to procreation?
Didn't they clash with the autobots?
Mark Tilden has noticed that machines that mimic biology take a lot less computation resources than machines that are strictly programmed.
2 0T ilden
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Mark%
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.
The author refers to the Genotype/Phenotype analogue wrt to the cells in the mechanized system they built. But he keeps refering to the Genotype as being the DNA (or code) as well as the behavior of the units. While the Phenotype is the actual unit itself.
The genotype/phenotype analogue is a good one, but his terms are not quite correct. The genotype should refer to only the DNA and genetic information, which in his case is analygous to machine code. The phenotype should be analygous to the behavior of each unit.
A pedantic technicality, but he mentions this a few times, and it's not quite correct.
Neat stuff regarless!
Your entire nervous system works like this, as do things like active transport protiens in your cells, the majority of organelles in your cells. A whole lot of nature follows, "The individuals posess little (or no) independant thought, only giving responses to electrical or chemical signals" plan. The interesting stuff comes from emergent properties which still seem to baffle scientists. For example, your brain is a collection of basically binary gates - few than are in current CPUs - and yet we (and several other animals) exibit fascinating emergent properties like emotion, abstract thought, and pooping, that computers don't have yet. I think figuring out the mechanism behind emergent properties (besides saying, "oh, well...uhh...there's a bunch of things interacting...and this happens because they're...uh...interacting") will really propel biocomputing. Hopefully whatever engineers implement the science have an eye for ethics, as well.
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?
This sentence in the article was rather creepy to me:
With minor exceptions, each cell contains the information to become any one of the 256 or so types.
That number coming up in biology is interesting.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
Birds aren't too smart because flying is hard to do.
This doesn't make any sense no matter how many times I read it.
First of, birds are the most intelligent animals after mamals. Flying for a bird is no more difficult then running for a human. Despite their small brains, birds learn to fly way faster then humans learn to walk. Insects also fly and they are definetly dumber then birds. I can make a paper airplane fly and it has no brain power at all. Basic auto pilot on a light aircraft have about as much processing power as a pocket calculator. I've learned to fly airplanes and don't think I've become dumber in the process.
There is almost no correlation between flying and intelligence or processing power. Any correlation that does exist would be positive, not negative.
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.