Gideon posted earlier on genetic algorithms used in computing. Today I saw this fascinating article on how bees can solve the Traveling Salesman problem better than computers. The Traveling Salesman problem is essentially this: given a set of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once? Or put in terms of bees collecting pollen: given a set of flowers, what is the shortest possible route that visits each flower exactly once?
This problem is extremely difficult to solve -- it falls into a class of algorithms called NP-hard, meaning that we do not yet have an efficient algorithm to solve the problem. Computers may need to be infinitely parallel in order to solve this hard of a problem in a reasonable amount of time. It's fascinating that we continue to learn from nature and bring these insights to the world of computing.
