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<DIV>From <A
href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/machines.html">Wired</A>:
Technology and biology are converging fast. The result will transform everything
from engineering to art - and redefine life as we know it. This interesting
article gives examples of features and behaviours typical of the living world
now found in artificial systems and gadgets. For example, computer scientists
are only just beginning to view operating system design from a biological
perspective. In fact, that's the goal of autonomic computing, an approach that
mimics the way the central nervous system regulates the body. Other examples:
<BR>NASA's Space Technology 5 nanosatellites, which are scheduled to start
measuring Earth's magnetosphere in late 2004, requires an antenna that can
receive a wide range of frequencies regardless of the spacecraft's orientation.
Rather than leave such exacting requirements in the hands of a human, the
engineers decided to breed a design using genetic algorithms and 32 Linux PCs.
The computers generated small antenna-constructing programs (the genotypes) and
executed them to produce designs (the phenotypes). Then the designs were
evaluated using an antenna simulator. <BR>Like strands of DNA, email messages
have a standard data format that amounts to a genome for legitimate email.
Spammers exploit and mutate email genes to obscure the origin or content of
their messages, creating distinctive spam genes. The genetic approach has made
it possible for Cloudmark to identify spam with better than 98 percent accuracy.
And our system is continually improving: Whenever it mistakes a legit message
for spam, a program called the Evolution Engine mutates the spam genes involved
and sends the misidentified message back through the filter until it classifies
the message correctly. Result: an increasingly precise definition of the spam
genome, and thus increasingly effective filtering. <BR>Research into artificial
intelligence aims to make machines more responsive to their environments. The AI
method, however, has been to program devices to react to specific events,
creating machines that are unable to cope with unexpected circumstances.
Complexity theory offers a different perspective. If a car were designed like a
living thing - as a collection of components wired to regulate one another in
response to external stimuli, like organs mediated by a nervous system - it
would act more like a living thing. <BR>Colonies of simulated ants laying down
digital scent trails can find the best way to send delivery trucks through city
streets or data packets through communication networks. More generally, ant
algorithms can find minimum-cost solutions to a variety of problems in
distribution and logistics. Unilever uses them to allocate storage tanks,
chemical mixers, and packaging facilities. Southwest Airlines uses them to
optimize its cargo operations. Numerous consulting houses, such as the Swiss
firm AntOptima, have embraced them as an indispensable tool.</DIV></BODY></HTML>