WHY THE NET NEEDS BACTERIA
http://www.newscientist.com/nl/1007/speedy.html
What is needed is the ability for buffers to know what kind of information they
are passing and adapt their length according to the need. To do this using
traditional techniques will become impossible as the Internet grows. So BT
turned to nature in the form of "genetic algorithms". These are biologically
inspired programs commonly used to help design--or evolve--things that people
find difficult.
GAs mimic natural selection by treating strings of data like genetic material.
These strings can be combined and mutated to produce offspring whose fitness is
then evaluated. The best are "bred" to produce more offspring. This is repeated
until the best design has evolved. The problem BT found was that GAs are too
slow for real-time applications, since they require the evaluation to take place
over many generations. So Marshall and his colleagues proposed a different
biologically inspired solution.
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