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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.
I, for one, welcome our new evolving hardware overlords.
God, I am so sorry, but it needed to be said...
Bah! It ain't in the Bible! Next thing you know, you'll be telling me that Programs don't believe in the Users, and that we should just blindly accept the secular rule of the Master Control Program.
That's it... isn't it? It's all just an MCP trick!
Well, I still believe in and will fight for the users!!
Thanks,
Mike
But this really is old news. I'm a 22 year old snot-nosed nobody and I did "evolvable hardware" during an internship two summers ago. My mentor had started on evolved FPGAs in 1992.
I am hoping that it is the writer's fault that this article feels so gloriously over-reaching and under-specified. From the paper, it looks like they have made a good advancement. They argue that their method is more effective than previous methods by several quantifiable metrics. From the article, it looks like they have invented an entirely new field that will result in the obsolescence of humans by 2010.
As for their method: It appears that the evolved genome actually dictates a structure that is imprinted a level above the fabric. That is, the underlying SRAM in the FPGA fabric is fixed, and only configuration bits are being changed. This severely hurts their claim of "generic evolvable hardware", but is almost an absolute necessity given the chips they are using. The reason our system was so slow is that each configuration stream had to be checked for possible errors: Some configurations would short power and ground, and fabric doesn't like crowbars!
In conclusion, I believe the writer of the article should be fired, and the authors of the paper should be commended for a good step in the right direction. I'd also like to appologize for my lack of coherance: I had my tonsils out and I am therefore high on Hydrocodone.
www.olin.edu
Ha! I counter your evolution with irreducible complexity. Take out a part and it'll start to beep and won't do anything!
What good is half a graphics card, anyway? (and keep your heathen comments about SLI for yourself, please)