Computational Pioneer Erez Lieberman Explains How the Web--and Spam--Evolves Computerworld (10/27/08) Forrest, Sara
as it appeared in the November 3, 2008 edition of ACM TechNews.
Erez Lieberman, a pioneer in mathematical and computational approaches to the study of evolution, testifies to modern computing's value to biology. "Whether you're studying human physiology or the mouse genome, 21st-century computation gives us the agility to handle huge data sets and to capture at least a fraction of the complexity that makes humans go," he says. Researchers studying social networks and the Internet are using Lieberman's research into evolution on networks, and Lieberman says that the Web, like biological systems, evolves through mutation and selection. He describes spam emails as an evolving population, noting that "just like viruses, which mutate their genome in order to disguise themselves from the immune system, spam emails incorporate typos like V1@gR@ to try and disguise themselves from spam filters. Now all this mutant spam gets sent out, and the emails that get the pitch across to the human reader while avoiding the spam filter will get reused in the future," which is an instance of selection. Lieberman also notes that evolutionary graph theory, which he developed with Harvard professor Martin Nowak, gave researchers insight into how network configuration has an impact on the evolution that occurs within the network. View Full Article
