On the properties of artificial development and its use in evolvable hardware

The design of a new biologically inspired artificial developmental system is described in this paper. In general, developmental systems converge slower and are more computationally expensive than direct evolution. However, the performance trends of development indicate that the full benefit of development will arise with larger and more complex problems that exhibit some sort of regularity in their structure: thus, the aim is to evolve larger electronic systems through the modularity allowed by development. The hope is that the proposed artificial developmental system will exhibit adaptivity and fault tolerance in the future. The cell signalling and the system of Gene Regulatory Networks present in biological organisms are modelled in our developmental system, and tailored for tackling real world problems on electronic hardware. For the first time, a Gene Regulatory Network system is successfully shown to develop the complete circuit structure of a desired digital circuit without the help of another mechanism or any problem specific structuring. Experiments are presented that show the modular behaviour of the developmental system, as well as its ability to solve non-modular circuit problems.