algorithms in nature

A L G O R I T H M S I N N AT U R E

N AT U R E I S A N I N N O VAT I O N L A B

Life is anOperating System

DNA = High density storage

700TB / gramEquivalent to 150 kilos of

230 3TB hard drives

Each cell has a CPU & distributed

compilers

Each cell contains a program that can

recreate itself

There’s a programmable protein 3D printer in each cell

1950 - Alan Turing proposes a new kind of algorithms

inspired by biological evolution

Principles of genetic algorithms

Replicate best solutionsIntroduce random mutations

Kill underperforming solutions

The Immune system as an adaptive machine learning

system

Dendritic cells are data scientists

Memory T-cells act as predictive model storage

Neural networks Rediscovered:1943

Slime molds

use external memory to process information

Don’t have a nervous system

Slime molds

Solving Minimal Spanning TreeAlgorithm discovered in 1926

Recreated optimal US highways

Took humanity over 40 years to solve

Traveling salesman problem

Ants solve it on a daily basis

Though each ant can’t even remember the way back to

nest

Graph coloring problem Closely related to maximal independent sets

Solved: 1976

Fruit fly bristlesGrowth patterns form a

maximal independent set

ISCB award to Ziv Bar Joseph

You are seeing a picture of a broccoli

A small number of genes encodes an astonishing complexity

FractalsDiscovered in 1975

a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern that

displays at every scale

The next breakthrough is out there

sagie@sparkbeyond.com @mesagie