However, most real world problems are not fixed. They change with time. In order to deal with these problems efficiently and effectively, different hardware structures are necessary. Evolutionary Algorithms are good at global exploration. They can explore a much larger design space than could be explored by a human designer.
Most researchers simply use an EA to evolve a circuit with certain specifications.
Little work has been done on the analysis of the evolved circuit in order to extract useful 'rules' used by evolution in deriving the circuit and useful components that may be used in other circuits. EA is regarded not only as a problem solving tool, but an automated discovery engine. This project will develop an evolutionary system for evolving hardware designs, and identify the advantages and limitations of the evolutionary approach in discovering novel hardware designs. As much as possible, problems identified by Marconi collaborators will be used as test problems to compare evolved circuits and manually designed circuits. In EAs, a population of candidate circuits is maintained.