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Evolutionary Computing Via FPGAs
fm6 writes "There's this computer scientist named Adrian Thompson who's into what he calls "soft computing". He takes FPGAs and programs them to "evolve", Darwin-style. The chip modifies its own logic randomly. Changes that improve the chips ability to do some task are kept, others are discarded. He's actually succeeded in producing a chip that recognized a tone. The scary part: Thompson cannot explain exactly how the chip works! Article here."
The curious thing is that despite GAs being widely researched for over 20 years, they seem to have found few practical applications that I am aware of. It is tempting to blame this on lack of computing power, but I am not sure that is the real reason. Either way, the possibility of automated design is very exciting indeed and I hope more people find ways to apply it in the real world.
I have the Discover magazine this guy was on the cover of. I believe it was July of 1998 or so. It was very cool then, it's still very cool, but it's old and I don't know why it was submitted.
Additionally, the submitter severely misinterpreted what Thompson's system does. He has the FPGA programmer connected via serial or parallel (I'm not sure), and he runs a genetic algorithm on his computer, the fitness function (the component of a GA which evaluates offspring) loads each offspring's genome (each genome in this case codes for different gate settings on the FPGA) into the FPGA, and separate data acquisition equipment supplies input to the FPGA, and checks the output, and based on that supplies a fitness value, which the GA uses to breed and kill off children for subsequent generations.
He has *NOT* implemented a GA inside a 1998 era FPGA (120000 gates max or so at the time on a Xilinx, which is what he was using) when he had a perfectly good freaking general purpose computer sitting right next to it.
Interestingly, if I remember right, it was all machine code, ultimately a series of conditionals about what stick movements to do as a response to certain patterns of instrument readings. They started the evolution by "rewarding" the code which just kept the plane in the air the longest... which, at first, was like 5 seconds. Within a few days of cranking, the code could achieve level flight with ease, and a few weeks later, with more added parameters, it was dogfighting mutated versions of itself. Then they brought in real RAF pilots and the thing just kept learning.
If I remember right, the article ended by saying that by now the AI, which runs totally incomprehensible code, wins most of the dogfights against human pilots, and uses some very interesting maneuvers which it wasn't taught (it wasn't taught anything). The RAF is impressed, and are thinking about a class of dogfighting planes that fly on AI. These things wouldn't mind doing turns at over 10 G's. My guess is that I've read this three or four years ago. Maybe the subsequent developments of the program got classified or maybe it just fizzled, but it sure seems like a promising avenue of research.
Being who I am, I don't get thrilled about the prospects of fancy new AI killing machines, but on the other hand, I want these designs to penetrate video game AI soon! For example I now play Civ3, which has pretty good, but not great AI. What would prevent developers from taking that AI, defining a "mutation function" by which certain parameters in it can change randomly, and then play different mutations against each other millions of times on a supercomputer? Or, even better, outsource the whole number-crunching part to a project like seti@home, where our machines do the crunching. Can you imagine an AI war between the best routines from Team Slashdot and Team Anand? Sure it's frivolous, but waay more fun to watch than brute force encryption cracking.