Artificial Life, a newly born science that uses computer programs that can actually evolve into more powerful programs through their own interaction, is beginning to provide scientists with a new class of software tools with significant commercial potential. The process has caught the eye of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and is being described as Darwinian software creation, as the created software’s behaviour seems to mimic that of living creatures. A computer runs thousands of programs simultaneously and a specifically tailored master program selects those most efficient for a specific task, effectively the computerised equivalent of survival of the fittest. The more powerful programs are then merged to create a new generation that is even better at accomplishing the task. Its practitioners believe that such evolution could produce software that is more reliable than that designed by human programmers who cannot anticipate all the potential ways in which software can fail. The science of artificial life resembles that of artificial intelligence in the respect that it attempts to simulate natural processes, but artificial life attempts to mimic the basic behaviour of all organisms rather than focussing on single human qualities and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Thinking Machines Inc has been looking into the technology. The first attempt is a program for sorting a list of numbers, and comes close to the most efficient human-crafted program for that purpose. Thinking Machines use one of its Connection Machines consisting of approximately 64,000 individual processors, which costs $1.2m. Instead of programming each step, the software takes the intelligent life approach by creating basic rules, allowing small interactive software modules to exhibit the kind of complex behaviour that organisms do. These artificial life techniques are also being used at the University of California in Los Angeles to simulate the behaviour of genes and of the organisms they make up. Scientists at the University have developed a program that mimics the behaviour of mosquitos and ants, to determine growth rates and so the quantity of pesticide needed to despatch the pesky critters. The program has been developed to assist officials in insect control in Orange County and Alameda County, California and has reduced sites needing treatment to 3,000 from 20,000. And Borland International Inc, Scotts Valley, California has already applied the concept in earnest, and has recently redesigned its Paradox and Reflex database management programs and its spreadsheet, Quattro to allow the interactions of small software modules to control the programs. The programs now run faster within the limits of a personal computer memory. Elvadia Tolputt
