Physical Evolutionary Computation
Eric Schulte, David H. Ackley · 2011
Although evolutionary computation (EC) is an “embarrassingly parallel ” process, it is often deployed on essentially serial machines, and even its parallel implementations typically retain the globally synchronized and regimented style typical of serial computation. We explore a radical ‘physical evolutionary computation ’ (PEC) hardware/software framework that is based on real time and real space rather than an abstract sequence of events—for example, the mutation rate is specified in Hertz. PEC supports massive and reconfigurable parallelism, using a prototype hardware ‘tile ’ that begins evolutionary computation within three seconds of applying power. Although each tile is a simple computer by today’s standards,