Physical Evolutionary Computation

Although evolutionary computation (EC) is an \embarrassingly parallel" process, it is often deployed on essentially serial machines, and even its parallel implementations typically retain the globally synchronized and regimented style typical of serial computation. We explore a radical ‘physical evolutionary computation’ (PEC) hardware/software framework that is based on real time and real space rather than an abstract sequence of events|for example, the mutation rate is specied in Hertz. PEC supports massive and recongurable parallelism, using a prototype hardware ‘tile’ that begins evolutionary computation within three seconds of applying power. Although each tile is a simple computer by today’s standards, tiles can be plugged together into a wide variety of size and shape computing grids|even while the computation is running. We present our initial explorations with this framework, dening mechanisms for representing and sharing problems, and mapping between computational spaces and physical ones. We discuss advantages of PEC|such as extremely robust operation|as well as its challenges, and touch on some unexpected, and potentially useful, level-crossing interactions that can be explored when the embedding of the computational within the physical is made real. 1 Scalable abstractions