SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Sat Aug 18 14:07:48 2001

It was thus said that the Great Iggy Drougge once stated:
>
> Tony Duell skrev:
>
> >I've seen hardware 'designers' do something similar with FPGAs (and other
> >technologies that are easy to modify). Things like 'maybe it'll work if I
> >change this AND gate to an OR gate' or 'I'll try inverting that clock
> >signal'. Or 'Maybe I need one more state in that counter'. No real idea
> >as to what they should be doing, and why.
>
> As long as you analyse it afterwards and find out what made it work/not work,
> it's all right by me.

  But what if they can't? Here's an article about a researcher who applied
genetic programming [1] techniques to building a circuit in an FPGA and
ended up with a 32 gate result (to distinquich between two tones), with five
gates seemingly unconnected yet crutial to the operation. The researcher
doesn't fully understand *why* it works:

           http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/ai/primordial.jsp

  -spc (Is uneasy with this but yet sees this as becoming more and more
        common ... )

[1] A method of evolving the best program to solve a particular
        problem. It takes several *solutions* and breeds the most
        promising ones to produce better offspring that get a better
        answer to the problem.
Received on Sat Aug 18 2001 - 14:07:48 BST

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