Digital Biology

How Nature is Transforming Our Technology.

'Imagine a future world where computers can create universes - digital environments made from binary ones and zeros. Imagine that within these universes there exist biological forms that reproduce, grown and think. Imagine plant-like forms, ant colonies, immune systems and brains, all adapting, evolving and getting better at solving problems. Imagine if our computers became greenhouses for a new kind of nature. Just think what digital biology could do for us.

Perhaps it could evolve new design for us, think up ways to detect fraud using digital neurons, or solve scheduling problems with ants. Perhaps it could detect hackers with immune systems or create music from patterns of growth of digital seashells. Perhaps it would allow our computers to become creative and inventive.

Now stop imagining . . .'

'Digital Biology' is a book you can't afford to ignore. Even dyed-in-the-wool technophobes will be gripped by Peter Bentley's brilliantly lucid explanations of how evolution, brains, insect swarms and immune systems actually work and what computation really means. And with this knowledge on board, the reader is taken on a fantastic voyage to the wildest shores of computer technology today (and in the foreseeable future), by way of digital universes far beyond imagination.