A case study where biology inspired a solution to a computer science problem.
This paper describes how the biological theory of gene duplication described in Susumu Ohno's provocative book, Evolution by Means of Gene Duplication, was brought to bear on a vexatious problem from the domain of automated machine learning, namely the problem of architecture discovery. Six new architecture-altering operations for genetic programming were motivated by the way that new biological structures, functions, and behaviors arise in nature using gene duplication. Genetic programming with the new architecture-altering operations was then applied to the transmembrane protein segment identification problem. The out-of-sample error rate for the best genetically-evolved program achieved was slightly better than that of previously-reported human-written algorithms for this problem.