Whatever happened to evolvable hardware?

Peter Clarke, EETimes
7/11/2012 10:55 AM EDT

The free market and many other natural systems are supposedly about the survival of the fittest. The survival of the best companies, the success of the best products, the best processors and ICs, and so on.

But what about a circuit that evolves through thousands of iterations, influenced by feedback, until it is optimized for a particular function?

I remember being excited back in the mid 1990s, reading a description of work by Adrian Thompson of the University of Sussex that made use of a Xilinx FPGA to perform the genetic design of evolvable hardware.

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