This section is meant to give you an impression of the FPTA group's work. In this place, we would like to offer the golden opportunity to everyone to see what we see and know what we know (... to a certain extent - for not everyone is made to bear the truth).
The picture shows the Heidelberg FPTA. The chip is connected to an FPGA based PCI card that manages the testpatterns applied to the FPTA's inputs and measures its output signals. A PC serves to configure the PCI controller card and runs the GA. One part of the controlware is written in C++ (PC), the other one in VHDL (FPGA). These components provide a real time test environment for evolved transistor circuits (system overview).
Here, a screenshot of the control software is displayed. It consists basically of three widgets: Main, fitness plot and output signal of the best currently evolved circuit. It is possible to watch evolutions online. Sometimes it is very thrilling to see if an EA succeeds or fails in the end. That's why we got around to call it 'Evolution TV'.
As you can see, evolved transistor circuits can look that difficult - even so, on the FPTA they behave as desired. Current research is done to simplify such circuits and improve our understanding of how they work. A simplified version would appear more like the lower picture.
The animation shows how one of our GAs changes the phenotype. Mutation as well as crossover operations develop the circuit until it solves a given problem.
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