Open book examination to be completed and returned by noon Friday, June 9, 1989. You may use any available references or your notes, hut do not collaborate with other students or staff regarding questions or answers.
The examination comprises development in essay form with clocunentation where feasible, of five key biophysical-biomimetic concepts with which we have concerned ourselves this quarter. These essays, typically two to ten pages in length, should be tutorial in character with illustrative examples understandable to an intelligent non-expert and should demonstrate that you have a firm technical and intellectual insight into the concept. Try to do an extra good job on one or two of the topics where you have real knowledge or interest enough to research the topic.
1. Show how the conceptual image of biological self regulation has gone and is going through a three epoch development proceeding from Homeostasis to Homeodynamic control to incorporate dynamically restructurable regulatory algorithms. Try to predict where this development may have great pay-offs.
2. Demonstrate how innate biological wisdom has incorporated highly efficient functional composite operating variables such as the three quadrature compaction algorithm that I have used as an illustration) to achieve reliable, fail safe - fail soft biological performance that would be very clumsy and low in cost effectiveness if formulated in conventional physical or engineering variable terms.
3. The “Perceptron” concept as originally expressed and as modified by Marvin Minsky was a first real effort to show that a computerized Ideal retina or a real biological informational array, could learn by experience, trial and error to recognize patterns without having logical “rules” and definitions except as determined by the “tutor'. If you have time or inclination, compare this with the current “chaos ” fad.
4. We have talked quite a bit about the human “Perceptorium”. Outline your image of this human “organ”, its components, its functions, its organization, its genetic start-up properties, its restructurability, and its code-language influence on our perception of “reality”.
5. Examine in a little detail, the proposal that biological nature is again utilizing the experimental evolutionary process, with flashes of insight as embodied in the biological doctrine of ontological recapitulation of phylogeny in a new effort at technological recapitulation of ontogeny, giving your own examples of plausibility.