DNA as an Archive of the Past

Each individual's genome, in any one generation, will be a sample from the species database. Different species will have different databases because of their different ancestral worlds. The database in the gene pool of camels will encode information about deserts and how to survive in them. The DNA in mole gene pools will contain instructions and hints for survival in dark, moist soil. The DNA in predator gene pools will increasingly contain information about prey animals, their evasive trick...

 Page Rank Algorithm and the Kleinberg's HITS algorithm

The most famous quality measure is PageRank [221], discussed earlier, which builds on the intuition that a page which is cited by many other pages is likely to be of significant quality. The insight of PageRank is that the obvious way to subvert that model is to set up a load of dummy pages to cite the page which one wanted to boost. But if a page is cited by many other pages which themselves have a high PageRank, then it is likely to be of high quality. The PageRank method has another intuit...