“An Evolved Circuit, Intrinsic in Silicon, Entwined With Physics”, 1997 (; backlinks):
‘Intrinsic’ Hardware Evolution is the use of artificial evolution—such as a genetic algorithms—to design an electronic circuit automatically, where each fitness evaluation is the measurement of a circuit’s performance when physically instantiated in a real reconfigurable VLSI chip.
This paper makes a detailed case-study of the first such application of evolution directly to the configuration of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Evolution is allowed to explore beyond the scope of conventional design methods, resulting in:
a highly efficient circuit with a richer structure and dynamics and a greater respect for the natural properties of the implementation medium than is usual.
The application is a simple, but not toy, problem: a tone-discrimination task. Practical details are considered throughout.
[The famous evolved circuit which exploited physical side-effects of the FPGA chip and the current room temperature (!) in order to work.]