A scalable platform for intrinsic hardware and in materio evolution

Abstract

An evolvable motherboard is an intrinsic evolution platform that allows the detailed probing of internal signals of circuits that have been evolved. Several designs for an evolvable motherboard have already been demonstrated to work successfully as a platform for the evolution of electronic circuits. This paper proposes a new platform that is suitable for intrinsic evolution using a wider variety of media. The platform presents a more modular design, making it suitable for use in evolving more complex physical primitives whilst affording the possibility of performing evolution in parallel for simpler problems. The construction of the device is discussed and examples of potential experiments in silicon, liquid crystal and other media are described.