Biomimicry: How Designers Are Learning from the Natural World (2017)

99percentinvisible.org

31 points·Brajeshwar··9 comments

I think it's hilarious that biomimicry is considered a recent thing. I had a children's book (mid-1970s, judging by the design) which didn't use the word, but explained two dozen examples where humans looked at a natural thing and thought "let's copy that".

What was the book called?

Is a german language book, the title was "Abgeschaut und Nachgebaut" (observed-with-the-intention-of-copying and reproduced).

https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/biomimicry-a-history

Do neural networks count as biomimicry? Are there good examples of software mimics life.

There are lot of software and hardware that use biomimicry.

Schmitt trigger, one of the fundamental components in electronics is based on nature (and its creator is called as the father of biomimicry/ biomimetics https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/biomimicry-a-history).

Swarm optimization algorithms (genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, Ant Colony optimization etc) are more openly based on nature.

Neural networks in their current implementation don't even come close to the complexity and computational power of a single real neuron. While that is the case, on an extremely basic level they are designed after concepts learned about real neuronal networks

I do mean extremely basic I can't emphasize this enough, so much so that I normally say its not even close

I want to second the 'extremely basic' part.

But, yes, it is biomimicry. Computer scientists looked at actual neuronal networks in animals, and said 'let's try to do some extremely simplified version of that' and that is how we got "neuronal networks" (bad name, but what we gonna do).

I heard there was some work in adding inhibitory neurons at least. Progress!

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