15,189 research outputs found
"Going back to our roots": second generation biocomputing
Researchers in the field of biocomputing have, for many years, successfully
"harvested and exploited" the natural world for inspiration in developing
systems that are robust, adaptable and capable of generating novel and even
"creative" solutions to human-defined problems. However, in this position paper
we argue that the time has now come for a reassessment of how we exploit
biology to generate new computational systems. Previous solutions (the "first
generation" of biocomputing techniques), whilst reasonably effective, are crude
analogues of actual biological systems. We believe that a new, inherently
inter-disciplinary approach is needed for the development of the emerging
"second generation" of bio-inspired methods. This new modus operandi will
require much closer interaction between the engineering and life sciences
communities, as well as a bidirectional flow of concepts, applications and
expertise. We support our argument by examining, in this new light, three
existing areas of biocomputing (genetic programming, artificial immune systems
and evolvable hardware), as well as an emerging area (natural genetic
engineering) which may provide useful pointers as to the way forward.Comment: Submitted to the International Journal of Unconventional Computin
Online tool for the discrimination of equi-distributions
For many applications one wishes to decide whether a certain set of numbers
originates from an equiprobability distribution or whether they are unequally
distributed. Distributions of relative frequencies may deviate significantly
from the corresponding probability distributions due to finite sample effects.
Hence, it is not trivial to discriminate between an equiprobability
distribution and non-equally distributed probabilities when knowing only
frequencies. Based on analytical results we provide a software tool which
allows to decide whether data correspond to an equiprobability distribution.
The tool is available at http://bioinf.charite.de/equifreq/. Its application is
demonstrated for the distribution of point mutations in coding genes.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure
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