<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px">excuse the off-topic flame-bait, but it is an interesting perspective from which to analyse Smalltalk's survival...</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px"><b><br>
</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px"><b>'Survival of the Fittest' Now Applies to Computers</b><br><i>Stony Brook News (04/16/13)</i> <br><br>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.</span><br clear="all">
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://commcgi.cc.stonybrook.edu/am2/publish/General_University_News_2/Survival_of_the_Fittest_Now_Applies_to_Computers.shtml">http://commcgi.cc.stonybrook.edu/am2/publish/General_University_News_2/Survival_of_the_Fittest_Now_Applies_to_Computers.shtml</a></div>
-- <br>best,<div>Eliot</div>
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