Biological Inspiration in the Design of Computing Systems

GIANLUCA TEMPESTI
The field of computer engineering has ties to the world of biology that date back to its very dawn. The Bartificial brain paradigm inspired pioneers such as Turing and von Neumann to design what we now call computers. Even if this paradigm has lost much of its value in the decades that followed, as more details on the operation of the brain (and indeed of computers) were discovered, biological inspiration nevertheless lies at the very heart of all computing machines. It is therefore reasonable to wonder whether this kind of inspiration can still be useful to define the next generation of computing systems, a question that becomes all the more relevant as the complexity of hardware substrates slowly begins to approach that of biological organisms.
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