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Abstract
Adaptive methods for growing electronic circuits on an imperfect synthetic
matrix
Nicholas J. Macias and Lisa J.K. Durbeck
from BioSystems 73(3), March 2004, pp 173-2004
Copyright© 2004 Elsevier
We owe thanks to the organizers of the September 2002 Evolvability and Individuality Conference in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, U.K., Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Paul Marrow, René te Boekhorst, Kerstin Dautenhahn, and Martin Loomes, for arranging this BioSystems publication of the
research presented at the conference.
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Living systems can adapt to injuries and even heal themselves, an ability
desirable also in synthetic systems. A method is presented for dynamically
adapting the construction of an electronic circuit to hardware defects by
formulating the process as a series of interactions between identical but
specialized structures called supercells. The circuit components, including
wires, can occupy any place in the hardware that has been determined to be
free of defects. The circuit specification is reduced to a connected graph,
with no positional information, and provided as a code repeated in each
supercell. Using the code, supercells differentiate into circuit components
in a late stage of the process, with highly adaptable physical location and
organization; supercells also form the wires between circuit components.
The structure and function of the system at three major levels is
presented, the lowest cellular level, the supercell, and the target circuit
level. Adaptation of circuit construction to defective hardware was
observed for this method. Results obtained from this development process on
simulated and real hardware with a variety of defect types and defect
patterns are presented, as well as higher level simulations of the
algorithm and its response to a wider range of defect patterns, amounts of
hardware, and hardware to fault ratios.
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