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"Dr. Adrian Thompson is a researcher operating from the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex, and his experimentation in the mid-1990s represented some of science?s first practical attempts to penetrate the virgin domain of hardware evolution. The concept is roughly analogous to Charles Darwin?s elegant principle of natural selection, which describes how individuals with the most advantageous traits are more likely to survive and reproduce. This process tends to preserve favorable characteristics by passing them to the survivors? descendants, while simultaneously suppressing the spread of less-useful traits.
Dr. Thompson dabbled with computer circuits in order to determine whether survival-of-the-fittest principles might provide hints for improved microchip designs. As a test bed, he procured a special type of chip called a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) whose internal logic can be completely rewritten as opposed to the fixed design of normal chips. This flexibility results in a circuit whose operation is hot and slow compared to conventional counterparts, but it allows a single chip to become a modem, a voice-recognition unit, an audio processor, or just about any other computer component. All one must do is load the appropriate configuration." ... Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. 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.