A group of researchers at Michigan State University is investigating how to harness the power of evolution to help design robust, cooperative distributed systems. Digital Evolution, whereby a population of self-replicating computer programs evolves through natural selection, enables system designers to explore an enormous solution space for complex problems, often yielding strikingly clever results. The ThinkTank Initiative includes several projects that use the Avida platform as a digital Petri dish for discovering new computational behavior. Evolved algorithms (sequences of instructions comprising the genomes of digital organisms) can simply be recompiled to execute on collections of distributed devices, including sensor nodes and micro-robots.The project involves collaboration among researchers in computer science, microbiology, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering. The results of these investigations, to date, are described in several publications, including a January 2008 IEEE Computer paper, Harnessing Digital Evolution.

harnessing digital evolution