Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7
New Ideas ... New Opportunities?
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity
under heaven ...
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones
together ...
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.
Ecclesiastes
The previous chapter was devoted to the investigations of recent years in informa-
tion technology, based on two approaches generally accepted today—the von
Neumann paradigm and the biological principles of information processing. How-
ever, at the same time attempts were made to find new ways of information
processing different from the traditional ones and having certain advantages over
them. These new ideas hardly have any fundamental novelty. Rather, they involved
a combination of digital von Neumann principles and biological principles.
7.1 Development of the Biological Principles
of Information Processing: Amorphous Computing
At the turn of the century, in the end of the last decade of the last century, a group of
MIT researchers headed by the physicist Harold Abelson proposed the concept of
“amorphous computing.” This concept was supported by DARPA (Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency) and attracted to its development a significant
number of scientists—physicists, chemists, and biologists. The authors of the
concept see it as a further, more in-depth elaboration of the biological principles
of information processing in biological systems, built from a giant number of
locally interacting elements. The main goal of amorphous computing is to develop
such elements and methods to control them that could ensure a specified collective
interaction. It is assumed that these objects possess some typical properties that are
manifested in practice—the spread of characteristics, the nature of the interaction
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