Abstract
In this chapter, the concept of unconstrained intrinsic hardware evolution — the central idea of the book — is developed.1 This will be done by clarifying the relationship between evolution and conventional design techniques, and then following a sequence of three experiments to see if the conclusions are a practical proposition. The experiments are deliberately simple, in order to investigate specific hypotheses: wait until Chapter 5 for a full-scale demonstration of the entire thesis in a more practical application. To close the chapter, the relationship between intrinsic hardware evolution and natural evolution is also discussed.
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References
Most of this chapter’s material also appears in: Thompson (1995a), Thompson et al. (1996), Thompson (1996c).
For no good reason, in this experiment the rank-selection method included truncation of the five least-fit individuals (they never have offspring). This is not thought to be significant, and was dropped on all later experiments.
The robot was constructed especially for this project. The author is responsible for all of the electronic design and construction, and for the physical design of the upper sections of the robot. The lower section was a pre-existing chassis borrowed from another project, and the extra metalwork was performed by the University of Sussex Engineering Workshops.
ROM = Read Only Memory.
Historical Note: The idea of making a highly efficient control system for an autonomous mobile robot by allowing electronic components to interact with each other (and the environment) more freely than is conventional dates back at least as far as Grey Walter’s electromechanical ‘tortoises’ in 1949 (Holland, 1996). Then, the active components were thermionic valves and relays, and ingenious design by hand was used rather than artificial evolution.
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© 1998 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Thompson, A. (1998). Unconstrained Structure and Dynamics. In: Hardware Evolution. Distinguished Dissertations. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3414-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3414-5_3
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-3416-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-3414-5
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