Nimay Gupta
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we look at an interesting biologically inspired computational problem. De-extinction, or bringing back extinct species, has been an important problem for conservationists. One of the key mechanisms suggested for this is back-breeding- selectively breeding closely related species in an attempt to get back the original species. In this paper, we consider a simplified toy model, considering only two individuals in each generation and modeling the formation of a new generation as a random combination of the chromosomes from both the individuals in the previous generation. We also added mutations, which are the driving force of the de-extinction process, and used computer simulations to predict the approximate number of generations required to bring back the original species with respect to the probability of mutation for any given generation. Our results were interesting, we observed that as the mutation probability ranged from 1% to 100%, the expected number of generations was roughly constant, while from 0.01% to 1%, the average number of generations steeply decreased before stabilizing.
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