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8 BIOLOGICAL INSPIRATION FOR COMPUTING
Chapters 4-7 address ways in which computer science and engineering can assist in the pursuit of a
broadly defined research agenda in biology. This chapter suggests how insights from the biological
sciences may have a positive impact on certain research areas in computing, although the impact of this
reversed direction is at present much more speculative.^1
8.1 THE IMPACT OF BIOLOGY ON COMPUTING
8.1.1 Biology and Computing: Promise and Skepticism
Today’s computer systems are highly complex and often fragile. Although they provide high de-
grees of functionality to their users, many of today’s systems are also subject to catastrophic failure,
difficult to maintain, and full of vulnerabilities to outside attack. An important goal of computing is to
be able to build systems that can function with high degrees of autonomy, robustly handle data with
large amounts of noise, configure themselves automatically into networks (and reconfigure themselves
when parts are damaged or destroyed), rapidly process large amounts of data in a massively parallel
fashion, learn from their environment with minimal human intervention, and “evolve” to become better
adapted to what they are supposed to do.
There is little doubt that such computer systems with these properties would be highly desirable.
Although the development of such systems is an active area of computer science research today (in-
deed, the Internet itself is an example of a system that is capable of operating without centralized
authority and reconfiguring itself when parts are damaged), computer science researchers are working
to develop new such systems, and the prospect of looking outside the existing computer science toolbox
for new types of hardware, software, algorithms, or something entirely different (and unknown) is
increasingly attractive.
One possible area of research focuses on a set of techniques inspired by the biological sciences,
because biological organisms often exhibit properties that would be desirable in computer systems.
(^1) A popularized account of biological inspiration for computing is N. Forbes, Imitation of Life: How Biology Is Inspiring Comput-
ing, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004.