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.
