It has been proved (GAs,Neural Nets,Ant Systems) that
natural (or artificial) processes do perform optimization in some way, even
when this is not clear in the first insight. Actually, sometimes the way in
which nature conducts itself is not completelly understood. In this sense,
if as you say there are masses of communities that involve space
competition, even when we still don't know why or how this affects the
community, the challenge here is to emulate this natural processes to solve
problems. For exmaple Neural Networks are still "black boxes", its
functioning cannot be completelly modelled when solving a problem but they
are quite effective in some human tasks.
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Julian Vincent
Sent: Monday, October 30, 2000 18:41
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: biomimetics for space allocation?
Dario Landa wrote:
> Basically, the subject of study is the "Space Allocation
> Problem", which deals with the optimal distribution
> of areas of space among objects. We think that the optimal distribution of
> the space might be present in some natural process that could be used as
> inspiration for solving this problem.
There is, of course, masses of information on territory and competition for
space amongst both plants and animals. But how much of it involves
optimisation? I suppose a climax community has more organisms and species
per
unit area, and presumably this represents some sort of optimisation, but how
to quantify this? Do members of a particular species live longer /
reproduce
more / have fewer diseases when in a climax community rather than a
sub-climactic one? Is that really the criterion for optimisation? What are
you trying to optimise?
Julian Vincent
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