Abstract
Nature is not afraid of complexity. Her solutions exploit the unpredictable and messy nature of reality. But our technology seems to be very different. Instead of exploiting its environment it is more frequently damaged by that environment. In this article I describe how we can learn from natural systems and create new technologies that exploit natural principles. I describe our investigations into the technologies of the future – devices that can adapt, be fault tolerant, and even assemble themselves. Examples of a self-repairing robot and physical self-assembling systems are shown, and I describe my systemic computer concept which aims to be the first parallel fault tolerant computer that is based on general biological systems. Through examples such as these, I argue that while we may never be able to predict exactly what a natural system may do, that does not prevent such systems from being extremely useful for us – after all, we are unpredictable natural systems ourselves.
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Bentley, P.J. (2012). Natural Born Computing. In: Kotásek, Z., Bouda, J., Černá, I., Sekanina, L., Vojnar, T., Antoš, D. (eds) Mathematical and Engineering Methods in Computer Science. MEMICS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7119. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25929-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25929-6_2
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