Exploiting Parallelism Inherent in AIRS, an Artificial Immune Classifier

The mammalian immune system is a highly complex, inherently parallel, distributed system. The field of Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) has developed a wide variety of algorithms inspired by the immune system, few of which appear to capitalize on the parallel nature of the system from which inspiration was taken. The work in this paper presents the first steps at realizing a parallel artificial immune system for classification. A simple parallel version of the classification algorithm Artificial Immune Recognition System (AIRS) is presented. Initial results indicate that a decrease in overall runtime can be achieved through fairly naive techniques. The need for more theoretical models of the behaviour of the algorithm is discussed.