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thompson_1996

Thompson 1996

Thompson, A. (1996, October). An evolved circuit, intrinsic in silicon, entwined with physics. In International Conference on Evolvable Systems (pp. 390–405). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Abstract

‘Intrinsic’ Hardware Evolution is the use of artificial evolution — such as a Genetic Algorithm — to design an electronic circuit automatically, where each fitness evaluation is the measurement of a circuit's performance when physically instantiated in a real reconfigurable VLSI chip. This paper makes a detailed case-study of the first such application of evolution directly to the configuration of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Evolution is allowed to explore beyond the scope of conventional design methods, resulting in a highly efficient circuit with a richer structure and dynamics and a greater respect for the natural properties of the implementation medium than is usual. The application is a simple, but not toy, problem: a tone-discrimination task. Practical details are considered throughout.

thompson_1996.txt · Last modified: 2019/10/13 14:54 by floyd