"Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest— with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output— yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.<p>It seems that evolution had not merely selected the best code for the task, it had also advocated those programs which took advantage of the electromagnetic quirks of that specific microchip environment. The five separate logic cells were clearly crucial to the chip’s operation, but they were interacting with the main circuitry through some unorthodox method— most likely via the subtle magnetic fields that are created when electrons flow through circuitry, an effect known as magnetic flux."<p>This is absolutely incredible. Makes you wonder how much potential the real world has compared to the simulated environment usually used to test theoretical solutions.
<i>>These evolutionary computer systems may almost appear to demonstrate a kind of sentience as they dispense graceful solutions to complex problems.</i><p>Stanislaw Lem wrote about this in Summa Technologiae. He looked at evolution as an alternative way to acquire knowledge (alternative to intelligence). Interestingly, this implies there could be other ways too. But the point is, he postulated that both are examples of the same class of phenomena, which is a fascinating way to look at it.<p>(He did write about artificial evolution as well. And simulation. In 1964. That book aged extremely well and is full of interesting ideas.)
One of my favorite articles on the Internet.<p>I remember thinking this was a powerful confluence of genetic algorithms and reconfigurable computing, two pretty hot topics at the time, and was sure that real applications of this were on the horizon.<p>GA's seem to have been generally replaced by various facets of machine learning (although I'm hard pressed not to see GANs as Darwinian in nature) and the whole reconfigurable computing thing just seems to have dropped off the map. I sort of get the former but am curious if anyone on HN knows what happened to the latter.<p>Still love the article.
For those who are interested, there is a much more thorough technical treatment of this experiment in Richard Gabriel's article "Design Beyond Human Abilities":<p><a href="http://richardgabriel.org/Files/DesignBeyondHumanAbilitiesSimp.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://richardgabriel.org/Files/DesignBeyondHumanAbilitiesSi...</a>
Posted many times, but only one small previous discussion, from 2015: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9885558" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9885558</a>
The subject matter of the article is amazing, but there seems to be some weirdly out-of-place sexual innuendo in the writing.<p>Like, what is the purpose of comparing evolutionary algorithms with forced breeding programs - or mentions of the researcher penetrating virgin fields of research?