Evolving digital circuits using complex building blocks

  • Authors:

  • Paul Bremner;Mohammad Samie;Gabriel Dragffy;Tony Pipe;James Alfred Walker;Andy M. Tyrrell

  • Affiliations:

  • Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of the West of England, Bristol;Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of the West of England, Bristol;Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of the West of England, Bristol;Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of the West of England, Bristol;Intelligent Systems Group, Department of Electronics, University of York, Heslington, York;Intelligent Systems Group, Department of Electronics, University of York, Heslington, York

  • Venue:
  • ICES'10 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Evolvable systems: from biology to hardware
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

This work is a study of the viability of using complex building blocks (termedmolecules) within the evolutionary computation paradigm of CGP; extending it to MolCGP. Increasing the complexity of the building blocks increases the design space that is to be explored to find a solution; thus, experiments were undertaken to find out whether this change affects the optimum parameter settings required. It was observed that the same degree of neutrality and (greedy) 1+4 evolution strategy gave optimum performance. The Computational Effort used to solve a series of benchmark problems was calculated, and compared with that used for the standard implementation of CGP. Significantly less Computational Effort was exerted by MolCGP in 3 out of 4 of the benchmark problems tested. Additionally, one of the evolved solutions to the 2-bit multiplier problem was examined, and it was observed that functionality present in the molecules, was exploited by evolution in a way that would be highly unlikely if using standard design techniques.