Abstract
Living organisms perform much better than computers
at solving complex, irregular computational tasks,
like search and adaptation.
Key features of living organisms,
identified in the manuscript
as a basis for their success in solving complex problems,
are:
self-reproduction of cells, flexible framework, and modification.
These key features of living organisms are abstracted
into a computational model,
called Growing Automata.
Growing automata are suited for extremely large computational problems,
such as search problems.
Growing automata are representatives of soft machines.
Soft machines can change their physical structure
as opposed to hard machines
which have fixed structure.
An example of a soft machine is a living organism,
an example of a hard machine is an electronic computer.
The computational properties of soft and hard machines are analyzed and
compared.
An analysis of growing automata demonstrates their advantages,
as well as their limitations as compared to hard machines.