April 17, 2013

“Survival of the Fittest” Now Applies to Computers




Darwin’s theory of "survival of the fittest" originally referred to natural selection in biological systems, but new research from Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University scientists shows that this evolutionary theory also applies to technological systems.

Computational biologist Sergei Maslov, a research staff member in Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), holding appointments with Stony Brook University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology, worked with Tin Yau Pang, a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook, to compare the frequency with which components “survive” in two complex systems: bacterial genomes and operating systems on Linux computers.