Evolutionary Algorithms and Analog Electronic Circuits
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Re: Evolutionary Algorithms and Analog Electronic Circuits
#2This looks fun. One could conceive of a three-pronged approach to circuit design:
* Manual placement of components, based on the designer's skill and knowledge
* Insertion of preexisting blocks from a library
* Specification of requirements for a generated block to satisfy, triggering evolutionary search as described in the article
I'm not sure how likely beginning with an existing design would impede the evolutionary algorithm from escaping a local optimum based on a bad decision, but one could integrate the third strategy in the above list with the first two in varying degrees.
Loosely related by analogy in the software domain: superoptimization. [1]
Re: Evolutionary Algorithms and Analog Electronic Circuits
#3How resilient is it to component tolerances? Have you tested the actual circuits to confirm that spice was accurate?
Re: Evolutionary Algorithms and Analog Electronic Circuits
#4Nice. You may be interested in Kosa's work in this area if you're not already familiar with it:
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~rad/courses/cs266/papers/koza-s...
Re: Evolutionary Algorithms and Analog Electronic Circuits
#5I studied EC a lot, and this is actually one of the strongest success areas for evolutionary algorithms. In general evolutionary computing does far better with real-world, analog, and physical systems than it does with brittle software systems. Other areas of success include mechanical component design, antennas, and materials.
The results must be post-validated of course, since in some cases it will over-optimize to quirks of the Spice or other simulation that's used to implement the fitness function.
Re: Evolutionary Algorithms and Analog Electronic Circuits
#6Re: Evolutionary Algorithms and Analog Electronic Circuits
#7A related article with some more complicated circuits http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
This was evolving an FPGA to do things like detect tones or voice commands. Weirdly reminiscent of DNA, logic cells which were apparently useless would cause the circuit to break when they were removed. Neither did the layout work when transferred to an identical FPGA.
Re: Evolutionary Algorithms and Analog Electronic Circuits
#8"Not very good as a reference but considering that this was generated automatically I think it's a success"
Behold 80% of the appeal of evolutionary algorithms... people get so excited that they do anything that they are willing to overlook that you burned CPU-hours of time to produce something that doesn't do it very well. There's this weird disconnect between how people speak of them and the actual standards applied to them that gets applied to very few other things. (Neural nets, perhaps. Even if they recently got better, they still were grossly overrated for a long time.)
Re: Evolutionary Algorithms and Analog Electronic Circuits
#9> To make this program useful it's probably necessary to add checks that power used by components is reasonable.
Indeed. It would also be interesting to see power consumption addressed in the cost function.
Re: Evolutionary Algorithms and Analog Electronic Circuits
#10"Not very good as a reference but considering that this was generated automatically I think it's a success" Behold 80% of the appeal of evolutionary algorithms... people get so excited that they do anything that they are willing to overlook that you burned CPU-hours of time to produce something that doesn't do it very well. There's this weird disconnect between how people speak of them and the actual standards applie…
There is an annual award given to the creators of genetic algorithms that produce results competitive with humans: http://www.genetic-programming.org/combined.php
Some of the results are really impressive. There are domains where stochastic optimization works really well.
And even when it doesn't generate human competitive results, it's still cool. It's a computer program doing something previously only humans could do.