Jim Dowe believed that if he could mimic nature's mindless pattern identifier inside a computer, the solution to his problem would emerge spontaneously. Mutants that can't find patterns, or can't detect them as efficiently, die off. In a few minutes of computer time, thousands of generations come and go until a highly efficient pattern recognizer evolves. Unlike competing products, Excalibur's document retrieval system requires no up-front indexing. Without human intervention, it takes the little critters about two minutes to index every word of a five megabyte file, like The Complete Works of William Shakespeare .
Close approximations are good enough.
Even handwriting and the messy images produced by OCR scanning won't confuse Excalibur's little critters. Along with enhanced worker safety, Lockheed saves several hundred thousand dollars a year by no longer having to index, photocopy, collate, and distribute materials safety data sheets. With multimedia vendors now facing up to the futility of retrieving sound and video by traditional index-based methods, Jim Dowe's digital creatures are finding their most promising market niche. Excalibur has recently licensed its core technology to a slew of industry giants including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, DEC, and Sun. But even that may not be enough.