Silicon evolution
Adrian Thompson · 1996
The advent of new families of reconfigurable integrated circuits makes it possible for artificial evolution to manipulate a real physical substrate to produce electronic circuits evaluated in the real world. This raises new issues about the potential nature of electronic circuits, because evolution uses no modelling, abstraction or analysis; only physical behaviour. The simplifying constraints of conventional design methodologies can be dropped, allowing evolution to exploit the full range of physical dynamics available from the silicon medium. This claim is investigated theoretically and in simulation, before presenting the first reported direct evolution of the configuration of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Evolution is seen to harness its natural dynamics and exploit them in achieving a real-world task. 1 Introduction There is a type of Very-Large Scale Integrated circuit (a VLSI chip) known as a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). These chips do not have a predetermin...