Towards Evolvable Hardware: The Evolutionary Engineering Approach

Eduardo Sanchez (auth.), Eduardo Sanchez, Marco Tomassini (eds.)3540610936, 9783540610939

Evolutionary computing, inspired by the biological world, is one of the emergent technologies of our time. Being essentially a software activity, it has been successfully applied, e.g. for optimization and machine learning in various areas. The tremendous increase in computational power and, more recently, the appearance of a new generation of programmable logic devices allow for a new approach to designing computing machines inspired by biological models: it is now possible to make the hardware itself evolve.
This book is based on a workshop on evolvable hardware, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in October 1995. It reports the state of the art of research in this field and presents two introductory chapters, written with the novice reader in mind.

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Table of contents :
Field programmable gate array (FPGA) circuits….Pages 1-18
Evolutionary algorithms….Pages 19-47
Artificial cellular development in optimization and compilation….Pages 48-75
CAM-Brain the evolutionary engineering of a billion neuron artificial brain by 2001 which grows/evolves at electronic speeds inside a cellular automata machine (CAM)….Pages 76-98
Morphogenesis for evolvable systems….Pages 99-117
Evolvable Hardware and its application to pattern recognition and fault-tolerant systems….Pages 118-135
Unconstrained evolution and hard consequences….Pages 136-165
Embryonics: The birth of synthetic life….Pages 166-196
Embryonics: A new family of coarse-grained field-programmable gate array with self-repair and self-reproducing properties….Pages 197-220
Evolution and mobile autonomous robotics….Pages 221-249
Development and evolution of hardware behaviors….Pages 250-265