Ebook: Hardware Evolution: Automatic Design of Electronic Circuits in Reconfigurable Hardware by Artificial Evolution

Evolution through natural selection has been going on for a very long time. Evolution through artificial selection has been practiced by humans for a large part of our history, in the breeding of plants and livestock. Artificial evolution, where we evolve an artifact through artificial selection, has been around since electronic computers became common: about 30 years. Right from the beginning, people have suggested using artificial evolution to design electronics automatically.l Only recently, though, have suitable re­ configurable silicon chips become available that make it easy for artificial evolution to work with a real, physical, electronic medium: before them, ex­ periments had to be done entirely in software simulations. Early research concentrated on the potential applications opened-up by the raw speed ad­ vantage of dedicated digital hardware over software simulation on a general­ purpose computer. This book is an attempt to show that there is more to it than that. In fact, a radically new viewpoint is possible, with fascinating consequences. This book was written as a doctoral thesis, submitted in September 1996. As such, it was a rather daring exercise in ruthless brevity. Believing that the contribution I had to make was essentially a simple one, I resisted being drawn into peripheral discussions. In the places where I deliberately drop a subject, this implies neither that it's not interesting, nor that it's not relevant: just that it's not a crucial part of the tale I want to tell here.

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The Distinguished Dissertation series is published on behalf of the Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing and the British Computer Society, who annually select the best British PhD dissertations in computer science for publication. The dissertations are selected on behalf of the CPHC by a panel of eight academics. Each dissertation chosen makes a noteworthy contribution to the subject and reaches a high standard of exposition, placing all results clearly in the context of computer science as a whole. In this way computer scientists with significantly different interests are able to grasp the essentials - or even find a means of entry - to an unfamiliar research topic. This is the first book in the area of Hardware Evolution. It uses a series of experiments to explore the practicalities of removing the constraints on circuit structure and dynamics which are normally needed to permit design abstractions, culminating in a simple but non-trivial application.

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The Distinguished Dissertation series is published on behalf of the Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing and the British Computer Society, who annually select the best British PhD dissertations in computer science for publication. The dissertations are selected on behalf of the CPHC by a panel of eight academics. Each dissertation chosen makes a noteworthy contribution to the subject and reaches a high standard of exposition, placing all results clearly in the context of computer science as a whole. In this way computer scientists with significantly different interests are able to grasp the essentials - or even find a means of entry - to an unfamiliar research topic. This is the first book in the area of Hardware Evolution. It uses a series of experiments to explore the practicalities of removing the constraints on circuit structure and dynamics which are normally needed to permit design abstractions, culminating in a simple but non-trivial application.
Content:
Front Matter....Pages i-xviii
Introduction....Pages 1-8
Context....Pages 9-34
Unconstrained Structure and Dynamics....Pages 35-56
Parsimony and Fault Tolerance....Pages 57-71
Demonstration....Pages 73-85
Future Work....Pages 87-92
Conclusion....Pages 93-95
Back Matter....Pages 97-117

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The Distinguished Dissertation series is published on behalf of the Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing and the British Computer Society, who annually select the best British PhD dissertations in computer science for publication. The dissertations are selected on behalf of the CPHC by a panel of eight academics. Each dissertation chosen makes a noteworthy contribution to the subject and reaches a high standard of exposition, placing all results clearly in the context of computer science as a whole. In this way computer scientists with significantly different interests are able to grasp the essentials - or even find a means of entry - to an unfamiliar research topic. This is the first book in the area of Hardware Evolution. It uses a series of experiments to explore the practicalities of removing the constraints on circuit structure and dynamics which are normally needed to permit design abstractions, culminating in a simple but non-trivial application.
Content:
Front Matter....Pages i-xviii
Introduction....Pages 1-8
Context....Pages 9-34
Unconstrained Structure and Dynamics....Pages 35-56
Parsimony and Fault Tolerance....Pages 57-71
Demonstration....Pages 73-85
Future Work....Pages 87-92
Conclusion....Pages 93-95
Back Matter....Pages 97-117
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