Earlier this week I was in Trondheim, Norway, for the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computing. Evolutionary computing, as its name suggests, refers to a group of approaches to computer programming that draws inspiration from the natural processes of Darwinian evolution, hoping to capitalise on the enormous power of evolution to find good solutions to complex problems from a very large range of possibilities. How, for example, might one program a robot to carry out a variety of tasks in a changing and unpredictable environment? Rather than an attempting to anticipate all the possible scenarios that your robot might encounter, and then writing control software that specified appropriate behaviours for all these possibilities, one could use evolution to select a robot controller that worked best for your chosen task in a variety of environments.
Evolution may be very effective, but in its natural incarnation it’s also very slow. One way of speeding things up is to operate in a virtual world. I saw a number of talks in which people were using simulations of robots to do the evolution; something like a computer game environment is used to simulate a robot doing a simple task like picking up an object or recognising a shape, with success or failure being used as input in a fitness function, through which the robot controller is allowed to evolve.
Of course, you could just use a real computer game. Simon Lucas, from Essex University, explained to me why classic computer games – his favourite is Ms Pac-Man – offer really challenging exercises in developing software agents. It’s sobering to realise that, while computers can beat a chess grand master, humans still have a big edge on computers in arcade games. The human high-score for Ms Pac-Man is 921,360; in a competition in the 2008 IEEE CEC meeting the winning bot achieved 15,970. Unfortunately I had to leave Trondheim before the results of the 2009 competition were announced, so I don’t know whether this year produced a big breakthrough in this central challenge to computational intelligence.
One talk at the meeting was very definitely rooted in the real, rather than virtual, world – this came from Harris Wang, a graduate student in the group of Harvard Medical School’s George Church. This was a really excellent overview of the potential of synthetic biology. At the core of the talk was a report of a recent piece of work that is due to appear in Nature shortly. This described the re-engineering of an micro-organism to increase its production of the molecule lycopene, the dye that makes tomatoes red (and probably confers significant health benefits, the basis for the seemingly unlikely claim that tomato ketchup is good for you). Notwithstanding the rhetoric of precision and engineering design that often accompanies synthetic biology, what made this project successful was the ability to generate a great deal of genetic diversity and then very rapidly screen these variants to identify the desired changes. To achieve a 500% increase in lycopene production, they needed to make up to 24 simultaneous genetic modifications, knocking out genes involved in competing processes and modifying the regulation of other genes. This produced a space of about 15 billion possible combinatorial variations, from which they screened 100,000 distinct new cell types to find their winner. This certainly qualifies as real-world accelerated evolution.