From Biology to Hardware

Evolutionary hardware is about hardware that offers the capability to change its structure and behaviour in order to automatically optimise its operation for a specific task or environment, taking inspiration from biological organisms with evolution as Nature’s guiding principle. We will look at how circuits can be evolved from in silico Primordial Soup, how shape evolves into function and how unexpected material properties are uncovered and made useful.

Nature has held solutions for many of the problems of today’s generation for millions of years, including complex information processing, path finding, powered flight and evolution. In this talk I highlight some of the most transparent forms of biological problem solving, as well as looking at the current state of the art in bio-inspired networks. Additionally, I will show how biology can inspire the development of novel computational architectures.

Nature has many examples of systems that, unlike traditional computing architectures, cope well with having thousands of computing elements - social insects being one of these. Starting from a single queen, many social insect colonies quickly grow to hundreds of thousands of cooperating individuals with a moderate amount of intelligence and without central control. In this talk I shall demonstrate how we can build computing platforms inspired by such insects and how they could be applied to produce self-assembling colonies of hundreds of computing platforms in the future.