Self-Organizing Circuit Reinvents Radio

PortWineBoy writes "An evolutionary computer program that controls circuits connected to transistors is told to 'breed' an oscillator. Instead, it breeds a radio receiver which picks up oscillation produced by a nearby computer to achieve the desired result. It seems interesting to me but does it have any implications or applications? Any thoughts on how something like this could be used elsewhere?"

Comments

Re:Different solutions

[Faux_Pseudo]

Quote the poster

I remember reading about something like this earlier, where they had a circuit that modified itself (it was implemented on an FPGA) and it was supposed to figure out how to solve a mathematical problem. After it randomly came up with a "working circuit", the engineers couldn't debug it -- until they figured out the FPGA circuit as implemented was making use of stray RF signals to help solve the "problem"

You mean this article?

Re:Dependent Evolution

[greenhide]

For those of you who want to read that article (or at least one that describes what he's talking about), here it is:
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/ai/primordia l.jsp

In a sense, the very thing that makes circuit evolution so potentially powerful is also its weakness -- it evolves to external conditions. In the same way that a hummingbird would be doomed if all the flowers that are shaped for its beak died out or changed their shape, so too are these circuits dependent on the environment in which they evolved. An ideal solution would be to allow these circuit boards to continue to evolve, so that when they are placed in new environments, they will be able to adapt to them.

Re:Sceptic

[tgibbs]

Call me a sceptic, but I find it hard to believe that a system just "invented" radio, when the heuristics already present in the system don't already know about radio in the first place. If the system heuristics really have no knowledge of "radio" then how did the radio succeed in the simulated evolution, if the effects wern't already present in the heuristics?

The heuristics probably knew how to recognize an oscillation, and that was all. Probably they just ran its output through a FFT, and the closer the output was to a sine wave, the greater the circuit's "reproduction" rate. In a sense, it did not "know" that it had invented radio--rather, it had, by trial and error, come up with a ciruit that generated the "right" output.

EMI, bad circuits and radio

[pjrc]

I've been designing and fiddling with electronic for many years now (10 years professionally, many before I graduated from OSU).

I can tell you from many painful experiences that the most common occurance when connecting transistors in an unintended manner is shorting the (low impedance) power supply with a forward biased P-N junction, or putting too much voltage accross a reverse biased P-N junction... either way leading to destruction of one of more parts. Let's presume they constrained the choices to prevent blown parts.

When nothing blows up, the two most common cases (when connecting high-gain amps) are unintentional oscillation and unintended pickup of stray signals. It takes good design practice and good implementation to avoid these (usually) undesirable results.

To say that it "Reinvents Radio" is crazy. Radio reception involves the concept of demodulation, where changes in the received signal are turned into the output and the "carrier" frequency is not. Simply receiving a signal is not radio, and any reasonable sense of the word in the context of transistor circuits. Extracting modulated changes to that signal is what radio is about. Even the simplest forms of radio, such as on/off keying (morse code, etc) involve translating bursts of the carrier into tones or some other indication to the user. The key concept is that the transmitter encodes information by modulating the transmitted signal, and the receiver recovers the information, not just the raw signal.

Usually, but not always, rolled up in the concept of "radio" is a tuning system that selects a very small band of the available spectrum for reception, and usually this tuning system can be controlled accurately to correspond to the know carrier frequency used by the transmitter. Certainly in its modern usage, the word "radio" reasonably also implies good selectivity of frequencies that are received.