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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?"
Another
experiment a few years ago produced a circuit that could recognize the
difference between a 'stop' and 'go', voice commands. Adrian Thompson,
who created the circuit, said- "I don't have the faintest idea how it works"
99.999% of the electronics devices I own and used seem to have fixed purposes and fixed designs. Perhaps this technology will find itself interfacing with organics/nerves in the future. Maybe it's distant circuit-child will do better than poking electrodes around on a brain saying to the patient "Are you still there?" The articles about human-electronic-vision seem to talk a lot about plugs going into heads.
Maybe this tech, combined with fixed technological components, will find itself into the human/electronic interface.
I've heard of at least three circumstances where they tried to use a GA to develop something and the final solution ends up cheating, using some quirk of the system that wasn't anticipated. So it seems to me that evolution always cheats, though no doubt there are numerous experiments where that doesn't happen and no one think it's special.
I guess what I'm saying is: So what? We've seen this before, even if not this exact thing.
i wonder how the game theorists would explain that?
Winning?
I bred tic-tac-toe programs around 1987, and they were always surprising me. The first round of winners evolved to win by cheating -- they found a bug in my software that allowed them to make three moves all at once and win on the first move!
When I fixed that, they cheated again, by collusion: when they played the O's they dithered and did nothing, so that when they played the X's they could get an easy win with no resistance. I had to breed the O and X populations separately to fix that.
As for finding genetically evolved solutions puzzling, again that's par for the course. It is extremely difficult, in fact, to breed populations whose solutions *do* make sense. They find "organic", bizarre, complicated, twisted, fragile solutions much more often than something simple and straight-forward.
I gave a talk entitled "On the Evolution of Dishonesty" on the phenomenon to the local AI society (the title being of course a take-off on Axlerod's "Evolution of Cooperation"
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Around here, we call it interference.
load "linux",8,1
The article is sensationalist and irresponsible, as it talks of how the genetic algorithm "surprised the scientists", and how nobody knows how the circuit "figured out" one trace could act as an antenna.
The problem is that the non-tech-savvy of the world will read this and actually be made to believe these are thinking machines which are truly learning on their own. It conjures up images of a Matrix future.
I'm quite sure the scientists didn't find the results all that stunning. They ran random mutations and "evolved" an oscillator from the interconnections of 10 transistors. The algorithm of course *failed* to generate an oscillator, and instead cheated by picking up a nearby radiowave.
Nothing in the circuit "figured out" about antennas and radio waves - it was just random luck, much as any result in such an experiment is.
Some might argue with calling the cheating oscillator a failure. I disagree - I think it's a wonderful example of how far AI research has to go yet. What they wanted was an oscillator, presumably one that would work (were this a circuit designing machine in the real world) elsewhere outside the lab. The algorithm was too dumb to realize it's design won't be portable past the lab table.
I really don't think random mutation with selection is going to be the answer, if there's even an answer to be had. Computers are for automating, humans using them as tools are for innovating.
11*43+456^2
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?
Ascii artist &
It was a genetic algorithm that tried different combinations and evaluated each of them to see how much of an oscillation each combination produced.
The radio receiver combination simply gave a bigger oscillation than the other combinations, so it was selected as the best circuit.
The only way it is surprising is because there was an extra input that they had not considered...but now that the input is known it is quite simple to explain the output. No astounding AI here.
Like, what if a evolved chip only works properly at a range of 35-40 C ? Or more easly affected on electroic noise, or needs electronic noise? Like the circuit in this article, if there was no osculation nearby, it probaly wouldn't work would it?
This is the main thing to understand from these experiments - yes, they'd probably fail when removed from that environment, but then conventionally evolved life, which has adapted in the same way to use what's around it (Humans for example, in a most basic sense, use oxygen, certain foods, night/day to stay functioning and sane) are the same. Stick us in a different atmosphere, feed us nothing but one nutrient (say, caffeine) and keep it permanent nighttime, and we turn into coders.
a grrl & her quadra
The device did no such thing. It merely functioned within the requirements of the program. If the researchers were really interested in a better oscillator, they would put it in a radiation-free box and try again. The device didn't sit down and think "Hey, if I find an external oscillation, I don't have to develop one of my own..." By chance and structure it was given this opportunity. If the board had been made another way, it might not have worked.
Though, we should make more computers like this: a sequence of self-programming gates and a rule structure instead of a hard-coded processor doing much of the work. Any application or component could have it's own recorded "last state" for the FPGA, and it would load the state and the programming for the application.
Wouldn't it be cool if Quake III's frame rate improved with play, or if the bots could also become smarter? Two identical systems might run entirely differently, making use of the radio waves and various external interferences around them to improve their operation.
Programmers (and scientists) often work inside a little mental space that is the limit of their science. That's just how it works most of the time. You can't reliably sit down and say "most people have fluorescent lights flickering at 60Hz, so I'll use that external source for a 60Hz oscillator. The device, however, doesn't have any considerations, it doesn't know about environment changes. If the computer making the oscillation was shut off, the program would continue to try other methods.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Sadly, the evolving circuit was forced into bankruptcy court soon after the RIAA filed new CARP legislation through their paid-congressman of the week in which the circuit was made to pay $.07 per radio channel picked up per listening receiver.
Witnesses say the circuit was last seen on the corner of 7th and Main Street evolving its pan-handling skills.
I'm surprised that nobody yet has mentioned that Star Trek TNG episode "The Quality of Life" . (*) Was an issue like this predicted by Star Trek writers back in 1992?
(*) Warning, this site loads strangely for me in Mozilla 1.1. It's better but not totally un-strange in Opera 6.05.
(For the forgetful, it's the robot where Data thinks that those little 'exocomp' robots a scientist is using to help work on a space mining station are sentient so he sets up a little experiment. He sends the robot to work to fix a problem, and also generates a simulated problem where the robot would have been destroyed if it stayed to finish the test. Later, he discovered that the exocomp 'saw right through the test' and it not only fixed the problem, but it also turned off the false emergency signal. He eventually risks the lives of human scientists in an order to protect the exocomps from destruction because he is the only one who believes in their rights as sentient beings.)
So, after your computer gives you the answer you gotta build an even bigger one that determines the question. Reminds me of some book I read once :-)
Freevo - Linux Multimedia Jukebox
"Go on boy, go fetch the stick. "
"Dude, what is your robot dog doing?"
"I don't know. He isn't fetching the fucking stick. I guess I better dig up that reciept and get a new one."
"Isn't this that new model with the breeding algorithm?"
"Ah, so that's what he's doing with the stick!"
>
Well, everytime I've played with circuits on a breadboard, 9 times out of 10, if it involves a speaker, I hear the local high-powered AM news station coming out of it. If there's a computer nearby, I hear "digital noise". In fact it's pretty damn annoying and changes depending on how close my fingers are, whether I'm touching this or that part, etc.
All you need is an antenna (stray bit of connecting wire), diode (transistor would work), filter (all the capacitance and resistance in a breadboard) and amplifier.
I wonder if they went back and checked, just how many combinations DON'T pick up the harmonics of nearby computers... I'd bet most of them pick up the noise.
For those of you who want to read that article (or at least one that describes what he's talking about), here it is:a l.jsp
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/ai/primordi
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.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Considering how oscillator circuits work nowadays.
The frequency determining component of all transcievers (cellfones, radios, commercial two-way, etc.) is something called a "fractional-N" synthesizer. This takes a reference frequency (usually a TCXO or crystal clock) and chops it up (fractionates it), then feeds it to a "divide-by-N" circuit to make the desired higher frequency output signal. Almost all VCO's work that way.
It then follows that the circuit sought out a stable reference signal to use as a timebase, via another outside source. This is also a common practice, using WWV(B) receivers or GPS receivers as reference timebases when two transmitters need to be synch-locked.
Sounds to me like the programmer was an RF engineer!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
...is that the experimenters didn't create environmental conditions that would evolve what they thought should evolve. They simply created conditions that favored the development of circuits that oscillate. They failed to create conditions that favored the development of circuits that oscillate independantly.
Others have said that GA algorithms "cheat". I prefer to think that they take things into account that humans don't. I recall reading about another experiment like this. The end result only worked when the temperature was within a very narrow range.
Yuck. Where are you supposed to run your circuits? In a room where the temperature, radiation, vibration, humidity, and barometric pressure are all held to design conditions?
That's why evolution takes so long. The "creatures" have to experience a wide range of conditions in combination. I think a better way to approach such designs is to simulate them in software, because we know that programs are deterministic. Hopefully, we can then check every "function" of such designs using some automated testing software to be sure it won't crash on us.
Of course, doing GA for circuits in the "real world" will produce more exciting results, but more pitfalls too.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I've read this story before, and it fills me with a mixture of wonder and sadness. I'm amazed at how clever evolutionary processes can turn out to be; I'm disappointed by the fact that they often seem to be cleverer than we humans can figure out.
If the workings of a simple tone-differentiating circuit are beyond human understanding, what hope do we have of gaining a deep understanding of the human brain, the most complex machine in the universe? It makes me wonder if perhaps the secrets of our intelligence are too complex for that intelligence to grasp.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Of course it's useful science.
Think of what might happen when you build the genetic algorithm into say, a radio transmitter. It could automatically recover from a defective component or a strong source of interference by applying the GA to reconfigure itself to match the most efficient configuration of available components and environmental conditions.
Self-optimisiing, self repairing circuitry - wouldn't that be valuable?
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Interesting? The mods must be smoking crack.
Since when has it been deduced that floods and thunderstorms are recent events?
The topsoil here in Northwest Ohio has a large percentage of sand in it. One might imagine that it is such because it was under water for a substantial period, when things were probably warmer than right now.
In the antithesis of this, this area was also carved flat by glaciers.
And yet, even in light of these enviromental twitches, I'm somehow able to write this right now.
Obviously, if a species ceases to evolve, there is a chance that unexpected external influences will cause its demise.
Obviously, if a species continues to evolve, there is a chance that unexpected external influences will cause it to grow resistant.
The earth is still here, changing, evolving, and generally putting up with its varied inhabitants.
Having now killed the basis of your argument, I'll move on to character assasination:
Did you return your copy of Windows when it stopped working for minor (but unexpected) influences?
No?
Weak. Try again.
Kid-proof tablet..