Session:

TUT - Tutorials

Title:

Evolvable Physical Media

Authors:

Julian Miller

Abstract:

I will discuss the idea of using computer controlled evolution of physical systems for computation. A term we refer to as evolution in materio. I give a review of work done in the field (mainly relating to intrinsic evolvable hardware), including the famous work of Gordon Pask in 1950s. I will discuss in particular the well known work of Adrian Thompson on the evolution of a tone discriminator using unconstrained evolution on a Xilinx FPGA. Finally I discuss the ground breaking recent work of Harding and Miller who have demonstrated the evolution of a Liquid Crystal Display as a computational device. The tutorial includes a review of other potential physically evolvable systems.