IlliGAL Blogging

An article in Computer Weekly reports the results of the British Computer Society Grand Challenge conference, and bio-inspired computing, including genetic algorithms, figures prominently under the category Non-Classical Computation.

But quantum computing is not the only area of interest to non-classical computing researchers. Biological systems will provide it with much inspiration, says the BCS report, because living organisms have much to teach us about non-sequential, autonomous processing (consider, for example, how individual cells know what they should be doing without any central control).

Genetic algorithms and neurology will be an important part of this challenge, as will artificial immune systems. The Royal Mail has already trialed the latter as a means of automatically detecting fraud at its branches.

These systems require a new type of training and worker:

We are looking at new degrees where it is not just computer science-inspired biology or biology-inspired computing, it is a new type of person who understands how to build complex systems. To do that, they have to be both a computer scientist and a biologist

The grand challenge in this area is called in vivo-in silico (iViS), the creation of life on a computer.