Evolving Circuits in Seconds: Experiments with a Stand-Alone Board-Level Evolvable System

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to illustrate a stand-alone board-level evolvable system (SABLES) and its performance, and second to illustrate some problems that occur during evolution with real hardware in the loop, or when the intention of the user is not completely reflected in the fitness function. SABLES is part of an effort to achieve integrated evolvable systems. SABLES provides autonomous, fast (tens to hundreds of seconds), on-chip evolution involving about 100,000 circuit evaluations. Its main components are a JPL Field Programmable Transistor Array (FPTA) chip used as transistor-level reconfigurable hardware, and a TI DSP that implements the evolutionary algorithm controlling the FPTA reconfiguration. The paper details an example of evolution on SABLES and points out to certain transient and memory effects that affect the stability of solutions obtained reusing the same piece of hardware for rapid testing of individuals during evolution. It also illustrates ho...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: EH
• Authors: Adrian Stoica, Ricardo Salem Zebulum, Michael I. Ferguson, Didier Keymeulen, Vu Duong
• Keywords: EH 2002, Field Programmable Transistor, Fitness Function, Hardware, Integrated Evolvable Systems