We humans have another trick up our sleeves, of course. It's not only our individual brains that exploit parallelism. It's our culture, too. Although the Internet is, in principle, a massively parallel network computer, projects like Seti@Home and distributed.net haven't yet begun to transform computing in anything like the way the Web has begun to transform human culture. The dynamics of this transformation are explored in another recent book, Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine, from Oxford University Press. Blackmore is a disciple of Richard Dawkins, who in his book The Selfish Gene, also from Oxford University Press, argued the true engine of evolution isn't the reproductive behavior of species, but the replicative behavior of genes. These replicators drove biological evolution for millions of years but -- Dawkins noted in passing -- DNA is not the only possible substrate for replication. With the advent of human culture there appeared a new medium for replication -- not of genes, but of ideas, or images, or tunes, or techniques. Dawkins suggested that competition among these "memes" kicked evolution into a higher gear. Blackmore elaborates on this idea: memetic replication drives cultural evolution far more efficiently than genetic replication drives biological evolution.
From this perspective it's the Internet's ability to link minds, not merely computers, that emerges as its most important innovation. Computers may be marching relentlessly up the curve defined by Moore's law but we, as a species, aren't standing still either. We're augmenting the massive parallelism within our own brains with a new kind of massive parallelism that can link many minds into collaborative relationships.
Of course it's true that science, literature, art, music, and all other cultural activities have always been processes of meme replication. The printing press was a major catalyst enabling these processes to run faster. The Web is an even more powerful enzyme, whose effects we have not yet begun to fully appreciate.
In this volume of Best of BYTE, we explore the emergence of some heuristic algorithms. Although we have only scratched the surface of this intriguing subject, we hope we've suggested the potential of the synthesis of heuristics and algorithms.
