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.

Comments

Re:I'm so, so sorry...

[fyngyrz]

That same number of generations took humans 800,000 - 900,000 years.

Mmmmm.... yeah, but it resulted in George Bush. If they're really serious about equivalent advantages, you could end up with an "evolved" CPU that tries to execute your software using a dialect of COBOL that is not only obsolete, but contains misspellings and incorrectly used operators... then when an error occurs, the system will insist on executing the operation anyway.

Actual George Bush quote:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." --Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004