The New Nation - Internet Edition

Insights from artificial life could soon be helping run BT's networks.

The telecommunications firm wants to give its networks life-like abilities so they can self-regulate, recover from injury and respond to changing demands.

BT is keen to use these techniques to make wireless networks more reliable and adaptable and help distribute net-based services.

It unveiled its research at the Artificial Life XI conference taking place in Winchester this week.

At the ALife conference biologists, computer scientists, roboticists, and philosophers are debating ways to borrow ideas from life to either mimic it in hardware or software or create it from scratch.

"If we look at the biological world, there is a huge amount of change, complexity, and adaptation," said former biologist Paul Marrow who works in BT's Broadband Applications Research Centre.

"These artificial life ideas are a very useful source of inspiration as the products and services we provide become increasingly complex and demanding in terms of resources.

One parallel is in the division of labour. The graphical interface users see on their computers is the result of many different kinds of tasks which may include processing, memory storage, encryption, or multimedia content.

In the telecommunications industry, cleanly dividing these different tasks and distributing them across different parts of a network is called "encapsulating" and is analogous to the tasks allocated to different parts of a living cell.