Evolving diverse hardwares using speciated genetic algorithm

Keum-Sung Hwang, Sung-Bae Cho

Abstract: Evolvable hardware (EHW) has become an attractive topic recently because such hardware can reconfigure itself to adapt to the environment it is embedded in. EHW uses a genetic algorithm (GA), which is one of the evolutionary algorithms, to search for the goal hardware. In this paper, we propose EHW using a speciated GA that can evolve diverse circuits with single-step evolution. The speciation algorithm helps to find diverse solutions as the result of the evolution, and maintains the diversity during the evolution. We have applied a fitness-sharing method for speciation to the EHW of a 6-multiplexer, and have obtained diverse hardware structures. Also, we have found a circuit in 35% less generations than we did with a conventional genetic algorithm.