When machines breed

August 13, 2004 | Source: Salon.com

Evolvable hardware — machines that design themselves — can get the job done, even if humans have no idea how they do it.

Using evolutionary processes to optimize machine performance is nothing new. What is new, however, is the application of evolutionary processes in the hardware realm. Thanks to reconfigurable devices such as the field programmable gate array (FPGA) and increasing computational power, researchers are suddenly free to let their designs evolve for a while just to see what happens.