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Evolved Computing Devices and the Implementation Problem

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Abstract

The evolutionary circuit design is an approach allowing engineers to realize computational devices. The evolved computational devices represent a distinctive class of devices that exhibits a specific combination of properties, not visible and studied in the scope of all computational devices up till now. Devices that belong to this class show the required behavior; however, in general, we do not understand how and why they perform the required computation. The reason is that the evolution can utilize, in addition to the “understandable composition of elementary components”, material-dependent constructions and properties of environment (such as temperature, electromagnetic field etc.) and, furthermore, unknown physical behaviors to establish the required functionality. Therefore, nothing is known about the mapping between an abstract computational model and its physical implementation. The standard notion of computation and implementation developed in computer science as well as in cognitive science has become very problematic with the existence of evolved computational devices. According to the common understanding, the evolved devices cannot be classified as computing mechanisms.

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  1. Bartels used an evolutionary optimization algorithm to shape laser pulses to distort molecules in specific ways to catalyze chemical reactions, with the ultimate goal of manipulating large molecules, for example proteins and enzymes, in a biological cell. The method has also been used to create new quantum behaviors at the atomic level. Human can probe quantum systems, but are not capable of exploring different quantum behaviors in a fast automated fashion. The results are completely unexpected and amazing from a physical point of view: behaviors are being evolved that were not known to be physically possible. This includes anti-correlated attosecond harmonics in quantum systems. The ability to move beyond the nanoscale to the attoscale is a major breakthrough, and the potential applications of controlling the behavior of materials at atomic level are enormous (Bartels et al. 2004).

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic under No. 102/07/0850 Design and hardware implementation of a patent-invention machine and the Research Plan No. MSM 0021630528 Security-Oriented Research in Information Technology.

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Sekanina, L. Evolved Computing Devices and the Implementation Problem. Minds & Machines 17, 311–329 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-007-9071-5

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