Inherent qualities of circuits designed by artificial evolution: a preliminary study of populational fault tolerance

Abstract

This paper outlines ongoing research that attempts to isolate qualities inherent in circuits designed by artificial evolution. In particular it focuses on one quality of great potential value, if its existence can be affirmed. Hereafter referred to as 'Populational Fault Tolerance' (PFT), it is the potential for a population of evolved circuits to contain an individual which adequately performs a task in the presence of a fault that renders the previously best individual useless. If the fault is persistent, the new 'best' individual may be used to seed further evolution, possibly attaining performance equal to that before the fault occurred, in a fraction of the time it took to evolve the circuit from scratch. This work is motivated by observations of such effects in previously evolved circuits and in other fields. Two questions are posed: (1) Can PFT be expected in all evolved circuits of some generic class? (2) If so, is this truly an inherent quality of circuits designed by artificial evolution?.