This week’s Wetware related stuff in the media, including:

• Programming like a human or breeding your software?
• Walking wheelchairs (is it still a “wheel”-chair?)
• Animals that know their cognitive limits
• Memory makes Sims more fun
• Paraphrasing software

…and more.

– – –

Walking is the nature’s most successful ground locomotion method. No wonder people are trying to copy it for human transportation.
Researchers invent walking wheelchair

– – –

Research indicates that some animals can feel uncertain about thinks, doubt their decisions and sense limits of their cognition. I wish all humans were as clever.
New Research Finds Some Animals Know Their Cognitive Limits

– – –

JoHo writes about the Sims 2 is coming out. The biggest new addition is character’s memory, supposedly making the game more realistic and fun to play. Is that a hint to its importance in real life?
Artificial Life: God and the Game

– – –

Technology Review’s Simson Garfinkel wrote an article claiming that long term data storage is maybe not the huge problem people tend to claim. A thought provoking article, but has me by no means convinced.
The Myth of Doomed Data [subscription required]

– – –

Technology Research News on using statistical methods to teach software to “say it differently”. And a Slashdot discussion to go with it.
Software paraphrases sentences
Paraphrasing Sentences With Software

– – –

And here is a prime example of the Wetware approach. The Register writes about a page that shows a variety of programming concepts that have been addressed with two different methods: Straight forward human computing and genetic methods. See who does better in each case:
Humans struggle for supremacy in online robot wars

– – –

Finally I ran into this list of distributed computing projects, that I thought you might find interesting:
Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects