Abstract
In a previous work it was argued that by studying evolved designs of gradually increasing scale, one might be able to discern new, efficient, and generalisable principles of design. These ideas are tested in the context of designing digital circuits, particularly arithmetic circuits. This process of discovery is seen as a principle extraction loop in which the evolved data is analysed both phenotypically and genotypically by processes of data mining and landscape analysis. The information extracted is then fed back into the evolutionary algorithm to enhance its search capabilities and hence increase the likelihood of identifying new principles which explain how to build systems which are too large to evolve.
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Miller, J.F., Job, D. & Vassilev, V.K. Principles in the Evolutionary Design of Digital Circuits—Part II. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines 1, 259–288 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010066330916
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010066330916