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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 31 2017, @06:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the tux-is-that-you? dept.

Hungry penguins have inspired a novel way of making sure computer code in smart cars does not crash. Tools based on the way the birds co-operatively hunt for fish are being developed to test different ways of organising in-car software. The tools look for safe ways to organise code in the same way that penguins seek food sources in the open ocean. Experts said such testing systems would be vital as cars get more connected.

Engineers have often turned to nature for good solutions to tricky problems, said Prof Yiannis Papadopoulos, a computer scientist at the University of Hull who, together with Dr Youcef Gheraibia from Algeria, developed the penguin-inspired testing system. The way ants pass messages among nest-mates has helped telecoms firms keep telephone networks running, and many robots get around using methods of locomotion based on the ways animals move.

Penguins were another candidate, said Prof Papadopoulos, because millions of years of evolution has helped them develop very efficient hunting strategies. This was useful behaviour to copy, he said, because it showed that penguins had solved a tricky optimisation problem - how to ensure as many penguins as possible get enough to eat. [...] "There must be something special about their hunting strategy," he said, adding that an inefficient strategy would mean many birds starved.

Tux was not involved.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @09:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @09:03PM (#461429)

    The beauty of infinity is that it doesn't actually matter what the probabilities are, as long as they're not zero.

    I'm not sure what I think about this. From an abstract mathematical perspective you are (probably) right... but are you really?

    For the sake of argument, let's say there are 2^10 particles in the universe, and the universe is 2^10 picoseconds old. Now imagine probability of randomly typing out Shakespeare is 1 out of 2^2^1000000000000000000. So really... it is effectively impossible in the universe.

    So does it merely matter that it is a non-zero probability, because I somehow feel like you need more than that, even if I don't know what or how.