• Question: What is the most clever thing you have made a computer do?

    Asked by mimi22 to David on 15 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by jeromeswh.
    • Photo: David Corne

      David Corne answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Very good question! I can’t really decide, but I think I’d go for some experiments I did (with a student doing lots of the work), into finding good ways to treat a patient with HIV (but you can use the same method with any serious disease). You input details about the patient, and about how infected they are.and then you input details about the drugs that can be used to treat the illness, and the possible side effects. The computer program then works out the best schedule or treatment to keep the patient as healthy as possible for as long as possible. It comes up with treatments that are possibly much better than what is used in hospitals. The program itself uses clever things like cellular automata, differential equations, and evolutionary algorithms.

      The first thing I ever did with a computer, by the way, was get it to print out “Dave is Great!” about 1,000 times.

Comments