Evolvable hardware: A tool for reverse engineering of biological systems

Abstract

Biological networks are examples of highly dynamic complex biological processes. As such, one might say that they represent some of the goals sought in evolvable hardware systems. Rather than studying such systems as a basis for newer or refined bio-inspired techniques, the goal of this paper is to present systems biology and in particularly biological networks as one potential "killer application" area for evolvable hardware. To this end, the paper highlights why such an application area can be beneficial to evolvable hardware. Further, the paper proposes artificial development, a newer bioinspired technique, as a technique suitable for such an application and highlights the issues to be addressed and challenges to be faced so as to achieve models of such processes. In addition, the paper discusses how hypothesis generated, from hardware simulations of the dynamics of the model, may be tuned by refined biological knowledge. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.