BETTER ART SUPPLIES THROUGH SELECTIVE BREEDING

A two-year-old Cambridge start-up has figured out how to harness the power of natural selection --- by putting genes into felt-tipped markers! The art supplies company Crayola hopes to use this technology to evolve a whole new generation of markers. It's better art supplies through selective breeding, or something like that.

The whole process seems like a mixture of Gregor Mendel and Dr. Frankenstein. Crayola will simply cross a population of top-selling felt-tip markers with a population of pens that have new genes --- that is, new ideas dreamed up by Crayola's designers. These new pens might have a different kind of cap than Crayola's current pens, or they might have different taper in the barrel. The genetically modified pens will be evaluated by Crayola's customers and segregated into two groups --- those that the customers like, and those that they don't. The pens that nobody likes will be sacrificed, but those pens that are loved will be allowed to breed again and have children of their own. The whole process will then repeat.

Of course Affinnova, the Cambridge start-up, hasn't really figured out a way to put genetic information into actual inanimate objects. At least, not the kind of genes made out of nucleic acids. What Affinnova has created instead is a mathematical model of Crayola markers in which key aspects of the marker's visual appearance is dictated by eight numeric parameters --- the "genes."

To breed two markers together, Affinnova's software combines two parents and creates a range of children which have some characteristics from each parent --- and perhaps with a random "mutation" thrown in every now and then for good measure. The software uses these parameters to draw a digital picture of a marker with those characteristics --- without forcing Crayola to spend tens of thousands of dollars setting up a production run at one of its factories. Finally, the images will be downloaded to the web browser of people who have signed up to be part of Crayola's focus group. These people vote on which markers they like and which they don't, and that determines which markers get thrown out and which get to have their genes passed on to future generations.

Affinnova has come up with a revolutionary new twist on the 1980s concept of "genetic programming." Back then, a bunch of computer scientists realized that the principles behind natural selection could be easily applied to computer design. The scientists treated the actual machine code of a program as its genetic blueprint. By cross-breeding the programs that performed well at a particular task, then simulating thousands of generations, researchers were able to evolve programs that could sort numbers, fly airplanes, and even make money on the stock market.

But despite the technique's apparent success, genetic programming never really caught on in the mainstream. The problem is that evolution is a very messy business: the programs that genetic programming evolved did a good job, but they were filled with apparently arbitrary code which made them extremely difficult for humans to analyze and figure out precisely why they worked. An autopilot evolved with genetic programming techniques might actually do a better job flying a simulated passenger jet than one that had been painstakingly developed by a team of a programmers, but there was no way that the FAA was going to certify such a program for controlling an actual airplane with actual passengers. Likewise, many investment houses felt the same way: with evolution writing the code, there was no one to blame if the software lost a fortune instead of making one.

These old arguments against simply don't apply to Affinnova, since the company's software is evolves designs, rather than actual programs. That's not much of a limitation, it turns out: the software can be used to design a better breadbox, create a new national print advertising campaign, or even create furniture.

With a large enough gene pool and user base, Affinnova's technology will even find small market niches that could easily be missed by traditional focus groups --- as long as there are some people who favor a particular combination of genes, those products will live in the company's simulated eco-system.

Not surprisingly, this radical new use of genetic programming comes from a radical source --- the biotech industry. Affinnova's founder, Dr. Noubar B. Afeyan, spent much of the past 18 years building biotech companies, most recently Celera Genomics, which played a critical role in the sequencing of the human genome. When you spend years working with genes, you start seeing genes everywhere.

"I've spoken with a lot of people who say 'Isn't this the way that products are made today?'" quips Afeyan. And it's true: today's market is an evolutionary process. For most products like sneakers or felt-tipped markers, producing each generation is tremendously slow and expensive. With the Affinnova technology, new products can be evolved in minutes, rather than in months or years.

That's important because products, like organisms, don't exist in a static environment. "Customer preferences evolve to fit what is being offered, which evolves to fit what the preferences are," says Afeyan. "This evolutionary process is being played out, but it takes years.  And it's pretty inefficient, using stores and magazines."

Another thing about the Affinnova technology: it's fun to use. You sit down at a computer and get to play the role of product manager, deciding which designs should be developed and which should be dropped. At the end of the process, your computer screen shows a product that you genuinely like --- and perhaps a product that you wouldn't have thought up if you had simply been given a blank sheet of paper.

One day in the future, Afeyan says, customers will be able to evolve their own products, then just click the "buy" button. But making that happen will take more than some fancy computer graphics.

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PEOPLE WRITE

Several people wrote me regarding last week's column, asking why I didn't mention CDR drives as a backup system. E.Y. in Seattle said that he handles all of his backup strategies by simply writing his critical files to one of those CDR discs --- which these days you can purchase for less than 25 cents a piece. CDRs hold up 650 megabytes (or more) and can be read on most standard CDROM drives.

The reason that I didn't mention CDRs, well, is that I forgot. Earlier this year I tried to use CDRs to back up a 20 gigabyte drive on my MacOS X machine: it took more than 20 CDR discs to do the backup, and I literally spent two days changing discs. The experience was so powerfully negative that I forgot you can simply copy a few important files onto a CDR drive. 

Beyond CDR, you can also get DVD-RAM, which is like a CDR drive except it holds 5 gigabytes. I looked into this approach earlier this year too, but frankly, for the cost of a DVD-RAM drive and the media, you can simply buy yourself a handful of hard drives.

Of course, one of the big advantages of tapes or discs is that they are easier to store and they are designed to be constantly taken out, put into your drive, and then put away. That's not true of IDE hard drives.

Finally, another reader asked about the long-term archival properties of tapes and CDR media. Nobody is really sure, I'm sorry to say, but it turns out that it doesn't matter --- the real hard thing about long-term storage of digital material isn't the media going bad, but being unable to read the media and the file formats of the information itself. I'll be writing more about that next time.

Simson Garfinkel

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