Evolvable Systems Engineering
I noticed a post on boingboing about computer designed antennas about to be used in a NASA experiment. It led me to The Evolvable Systems Group at NASA’s Ames research center. From their site:
“The Evolvable Systems Group investigates computer algorithms that automate the design and optimization of complex engineering systems for current and future NASA missions. Our overall goal is to dramatically increase mission reliability and science return through development and application of adaptive and evolutionary algorithms.”
This is the ultimate form of biomimicry. A human mind comes up with the specs and some seed designs for the algorithm and an evolutionary design and test series is played out virtually. To be clear about this, the algorithms can only optimize the parameters you have thought to model, so there are some limitations. This makes these methods immediately applicable to well worn models like molecular and electromagnetic force fields. I can think of dozens of engineering and systems biology problems that are still having their parameters worked out and would be great applications for these methods.