Stony Brook? So2meone should say hello to Emanuel G. for us, that guy is
off the wall. Okay no6w if we can just find a way to inte0grate this with
the dependency browser, we're _totally_ set. I might even write a letter to
the edi0tor about it!


On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>wrote:

> excuse the off-topic flame-bait, but it is an interesting perspective from
> which to analyse Smalltalk's survival...
> *
> *
> *'Survival of the Fittest' Now Applies to Computers*
> *Stony Brook News (04/16/13)*
>
> Researchers at Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory
> (BNL) have shown that the evolutionary theory of "survival of the fittest"
> also applies to technological systems. The researchers compared the
> frequency with which components "survive" in bacterial genomes and
> operating systems on Linux computers. The researchers examined the
> frequency of occurrence of genes in genomes of 500 bacterial species and
> found significant similarity with the frequency of installation of 200,000
> Linux packages on more than 2 million computers. The most frequently used
> components in both the biological and computer systems are those that allow
> for the most descendants, meaning that the more a component is relied upon
> by others, the more likely it is to be required for full functionality of a
> system. "We found that we can determine the number of crucial
> components--those without which other components couldn't function--by a
> simple calculation that holds true both in biological systems and computer
> systems," says BNL computational biologist Sergei Maslov. For both the
> bacteria and computing systems, the square root of the interdependent
> components is used to determine the number of key components that are so
> important that not a single other piece can be sustained without them.
>
>
> http://commcgi.cc.stonybrook.edu/am2/publish/General_University_News_2/Survival_of_the_Fittest_Now_Applies_to_Computers.shtml
> --
> best,
> Eliot
>
>
>
>


-- 
Casey Ransberger
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20130419/be4f6a06/attachment.htm