All issues

The article provides approaches to evolutionary modelling of synthesis of organised systems and analyses methodological problems of evolutionary computations of this kind. Based on the analysis of works on evolutionary cybernetics, evolutionary theory, systems theory and synergetics, we conclude that there are open problems in formalising the synthesis of organised systems and modelling their evolution. The article emphasises that the theoretical basis for the practice of evolutionary modelling is the principles of the modern synthetic theory of evolution. Our software project uses a virtual computing environment for machine synthesis of problem solving algorithms. In the process of modelling, we obtained the results on the basis of which we conclude that there are a number of conditions that fundamentally limit the applicability of genetic programming methods in the tasks of synthesis of functional structures. The main limitations are the need for the fitness function to track the step-by-step approach to the solution of the problem and the inapplicability of this approach to the problems of synthesis of hierarchically organised systems. We note that the results obtained in the practice of evolutionary modelling in general for the whole time of its existence, confirm the conclusion the possibilities of genetic programming are fundamentally limited in solving problems of synthesizing the structure of organized systems. As sources of fundamental difficulties for machine synthesis of system structures the article points out the absence of directions for gradient descent in structural synthesis and the absence of regularity of random appearance of new organised structures. The considered problems are relevant for the theory of biological evolution. The article substantiates the statement about the biological specificity of practically possible ways of synthesis of the structure of organised systems. As a theoretical interpretation of the discussed problem, we propose to consider the system-evolutionary concept of P.K.Anokhin. The process of synthesis of functional structures in this context is an adaptive response of organisms to external conditions based on their ability to integrative synthesis of memory, needs and information about current conditions. The results of actual studies are in favour of this interpretation. We note that the physical basis of biological integrativity may be related to the phenomena of non-locality and non-separability characteristic of quantum systems. The problems considered in this paper are closely related to the problem of creating strong artificial intelligence.

Course “Natural models of parallel computing”, given for senior students of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, Moscow State University, is devoted to the issues of supercomputer implementation of natural computational models and is, in fact, an introduction to the theory of natural computing, a relatively new branch of science, formed at the intersection of mathematics, computer science and natural sciences (especially biology). Topics of the natural computing include both already classic subjects such as cellular automata, and relatively new, introduced in the last 10–20 years, such as swarm intelligence. Despite its biological origin, all these models are widely applied in the fields related to computer data processing. Research in the field of natural computing is closely related to issues and technology of parallel computing. Presentation of theoretical material of the course is accompanied by a consideration of the possible schemes for parallel computing, in the practical part of the course it is supposed to perform by the students a software implementation using MPI technology and numerical experiments to investigate the effectiveness of the chosen schemes of parallel computing.