SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @08:59PM
That project is as useless and as deceptive as the "___ passes the Turing Test" headlines we occasionally hear.
In my mind, the relevant statement is, "If the nine-letter sequence appears anywhere in one of Shakespeare's writings, it is matched against the relevant passage in a copy of the Bard's complete works, and is checked off the list."
That's like saying, "aa, at, ag, ac, ta, tt, tg, tc, ga, gt, gg, gc, ca, ct, cg, cc." There, I've sequenced the entire Human genome, as every DNA strand is some combination of those DNA pairs!
The project could potentially be interesting, but it is certainly nothing like the infinite monkey theorem. If anything, I'd say that it lends credence to exactly how unlikely it is to create the complete works of Shakespear at random, as simply producing the 9-letter combinations is taking this long, and the works are millions (?) of letters long and thus something like 2^1000000 more difficult (back-of-the-envelope math here).