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The First Evolving Hardware?
Masq666 writes "A Norwegian team has made the first piece of hardware that uses evolution to change its design at runtime to solve the problem at hand in the most effective way. By turning on and off its 'genes' it can change the way it works, and it can go through 20,000 - 30,000 generations in just a few seconds. That same number of generations took humans 800,000 - 900,000 years." The University of Oslo press release linked from the article came out a few days ago; the researchers published a paper (PDF) that seems to be on this same technology at a conference last summer.
For once Skynet jokes will be on topic!
Shh.
I won't go into details here, but anything that can be implemented in hardware can be done in software and the other way around too. This is a nearly ancient Electrical Engineering principle.
In the era of programmable logic chips that can alter their own logic (the patterns are stored in RAM or flash RAM for crying out loud), this isn't even that big of a revelation. Indeed, Transmeta has been doing stuff similar to this and selling it commercially for some time. They just aren't using these cool buzzwords.
And evolving architechtures is something that I know has had some serious CS research since the early 1970's and perhaps even earlier. I don't think an idea like this is even patentable based on this earlier work in this area. I bet you could find some adaptive systems that were even build specific for the oil industry, which would defeat even a narrow claim of that nature.
Where the money to be made off of this sort of technology is on Wall Street or other financial markets. I even found a web pages from a research group of adaptive systems that said essentially, "We have discontinued research along these lines and are now working with an investment firm on Wall Street. Since we have all become millionaires, we no longer need to support ourselves through this project, and any additional details would violate our NDAs." I'm not kidding here either. These guys from Norway are not thinking big enough here.
Didn't I read about this ten years ago in Discover magazine? I remember being fascinated that some scientists had "evolved" a hardware design on reconfigurable hardware (FPGA? CPLD? don't remember), and it seemed to rely on subtle electrical effects rather than simple digital logic. The design would only work on the exact chip it was evolved on. If they even replaced the board's power supply with a different sample of the same model, it stopped producing correct output. Most of the logic gates were logically disconnected from the input and output, yet they were necessary to the design working. Amazing stuff.
Interesting you brought this up. This story/article is more or less a flame.
There is no content to it about the hardware and manages to deny creationism in the process of anthromorphisize something they won't tell is anything about.
I'm sure this story will evolve past this though. It is in the genes.
If anything demonstrates the mental retardation that afflicts Slashdot, it is the above.
Some idiot claims that a horrifically unfunny cliché needed to be repeated. Another person points out the falsity of that claim.
The first post is marked +5 Funny; and the second, -1 off-topic.
Just think about that for a second.
People, turn off your computers. Go outside. Breathe real air. Have sex. Get girlfriends. Stop posting on Slashdot and don't come back until you have gained the social skills and sense of humour possessed by any normal human being. Do it for me; do it for yourselves; do it for everyone.
ChameleonDave
I'd argue that "virii" is a word: it's the plural of "virius". Whatever a virius is.
The proper English plural of "virus" is "viruses", and this is why. Words adopted into the English language generally retain the pluralisation from the donor language, barring a significant change in meaning (which is why beetles have antennae, but radios have antennas). However, "virus" in Latin is a stuff-word, not a thing-word, and therefore does not have a plural form. (If it did, it would be "viri" [one i; "-us" changes to "-i"].) The change in meaning from "some stuff" to "a thing" is big enough to trigger English pluralisation rules.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
wonder what the machines will call the reverse turing test!
the reverse turing test ?
or
are you really dumb enough to be human test ?