The promise: cutting-edge strategies for software for a coming world of multiple supercomputers, where continually swapped programs and big databases will find and exploit unseen patterns in nature and society.

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There are investment professionals with multiple Ivy League degrees, people who wrote PhD theses on nuclear fusion or fractal patterns in nature, who have been lured to Wall Street to estimate whether or not a knock off version of Scrabble called Words with Friends will grow to 65 or 65.2 million users by September.

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UCL's system takes its inspiration from the distributed and decentralised patterns often found in nature.

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"Complex colour patterns such as spots and stripes are common in nature but the way they are formed is poorly understood, " said Dr Kathy Schwinn of the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research.

BBC: A bumblebee extracting nectar and pollen from a snapdragon

Trees, clouds, numerous patterns that we see in daily life--all turned out to be fractal in nature, described by a branch of mathematics that Mandelbrot had started.

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The Nature article, also published Thursday, said that such shifts in weather patterns and human-induced changes could have sudden and unpredictable effects on the global ecosystem, including the collapse of food supplies and other problems.

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