Evolutionary Machine Design

Book excerpt: In recent years, genetic programming has attracted many researcher's attention and so became a consolidated methodology to automatically create new competitive computer programs. Concise and efficient synthesis of a variety of systems has been generated by evolutionary computations. Evolvable hardware is a growing discipline. It allows one to evolve creative and novel hardware architectures given the expected input/output behaviour. There are two kinds of evolvable hardware: extrinsic and intrinsic. The former relies on a simulated evolutionary process to evaluate the characteristics of the evolved designs while the latter uses hardware itself to do so. Usually, reconfigurable hardware such FPGA and FPAA are exploited. One of the main problems that still faces researchers in the field of evolutionary machine design is the scalability. This book is devoted to reporting innovative and significant progress in automatic machine design. Theoretical as well as practical chapters are contemplated. The scalability problem in evolutionary machine designs is addresses. The content of this book is divided into two main parts: evolvable hardware and genetic programming; and evolutionary designs. In the following, we give a brief description of the main contribution of each of the included chapters.