You probably wouldn’t call a biologist to fix your computer, but new research suggests that ideas from biology could be the key to quickly fixing problems in the computer software we rely on.

Maintaining software costs some $70 billion annually just in the U.S., says SFI Science Board co-chair and University of New Mexico computer scientist Stephanie Forrest. Debugging programs is a major part of that cost.

It’s an overwhelming task for human programmers, who in some cases face hundreds of newly discovered glitches every day, she says. Worse, some of those bugs make software more vulnerable to hackers. “We can’t afford to wait,” she says.

Stephanie and her colleagues are applying a biologically inspired approach to software debugging called “evolutionary computation” – a kind of natural selection for software. In effect, it starts with a glitchy program, creates a group of slight variations on the original, and keeps the best variations as part of the next generation of the program. Then, repeat until the software does what it’s supposed to do.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recently awarded Stephanie and her collaborators $3.2 million over four years to develop the idea.