Distributed Hardware Evolution Project (DHEP)

[Moogie]

Thanks to prokaryote for this submission!

Have you ever wanted a place to call your own where you could go to just get away from it all?

Tired of the hustle and bustle of the modern day rat race?

Are you sick of being subjected to other people's rules?

How many of us have dreamed of being rich enough to own your own island?

Now YOU can own as many islands as you have CPUs and enjoy all of the benefits of being your own ruler! What's the catch, you ask yourself? This must be some sort of time-share gimmick! Does this sound too good to be true? Well, wake up and smell the coffee, because it is...except for the part about owning as many islands as you have CPUs. Read on to see how you too can be the Uberlord of your own little archipelago.

Back in the earliest, deepest, darkest days of the pre-Cambrian, on the cooling surface of a newly formed planet orbiting a young star, there arose the first primal stirrings of organic chemistry in action. Countless eons passed, and those chance agglomerations of self-replicating lipid vacuoles and amino acids began to self-organize, proliferate and mutate. More countless ages passed, and constrained by both the laws of chemistry, limited resources and the early environment, the first simple life forms arose. Vying for a share of the limited amount of energy and raw materials available, and through the driving force of natural selection, these life forms evolved more and more complex strategies for acquiring these resources. The process continued and via adaptation and mutation these life forms survived various global cataclysms and drastic environmental changes. This evolutionary process has continued (and is continuing today) giving rise to life as we know it.

Yes, yes, yes! Fine you say, but what does this have to do with island ownership?

Relax! We're getting to that presently.

Where was I? Oh yes, the present day.

Through the miracle of the Internet, science and limitless amounts of caffeinated beverages, you too can witness the process of evolution in action on you own virtual islands. Compete against and even cooperate with other islands in this virtual evolutionary world to produce the fittest individuals. By hosting Java clients that use modified genetic algorithms, help DHEP (Distributed Hardware Evolution Project) design improved self-diagnosing hardware.

<Homer Voice> Uhhuhhhuhhh, machines designing machines! It's the next step in evolutionary development. </Homer Voice>

What's so important about self-diagnosing hardware? More importantly, what is self-diagnosing hardware? Well, to blatantly borrow a page from the home page of DHEP here is a brief explanation of the goals of DHEP. Keep in mind that this project is one of the few that has actually produced scientific papers about its results:

Host an island with a population of circuits struggling for survival in a hostile online world. During your PCs idle time individuals from this population will evolve through artificial evolution in a process of survival of the meekest into circuits with Built-In Self-Test (BIST) and will compete with those hosted on other PCs by migrating to and from them. These circuits will not be constrained by conventional design rules since evolution finds efficient solutions without worrying about how complex they are to understand - just as it did with our own bodies and brains. You can join into this cluster in one minute by installing the client found here and name your best creations if they enter the "better than human" hall of fame.

Self-Diagnosing Hardware is capable of detecting deviations from its normal behaviour due to faults. Self-Diagnosis is important especially in mission critical systems exposed to radiation. Built-In Self-Test (BIST) is widely used yet commonly requires more than 100% area overhead or off-line testing. However in mission critical systems such as a nuclear power station controller off-line testing is unsuitable because we must diagnose failure immediately. The standard on-line solution is a voting system with two copies of the module being diagnosed which is capable of detecting faults immediately by comparing the outputs of the copies. However, this solution requires 100% redundancy for the extra module plus more logic for the voter. In the last 40 years of BIST research, spawned by the NASA aerospace program, conventional design has not come up with a significant improvement to the voting system as such an on-line BIST solution. You can help us to arrive at the next generation of self-diagnosing circuits.

Evolutionary methods such as Genetic Algorithms (GA) or Evolutionary Strategies (ES) attempt to apply Darwinian evolution to other domains. A GA roughly works like this:

1. Encode the problem at hand as a binary genotype.
2. Created a population with random genotypes.
3. Evaluate all individuals in the population.
4. Select the fittest for reproduction.
5. Create a new population by applying cross over to those selected.
6. Apply background mutation to all individuals in population.
7. Go back to 3 and repeat till we find an optimal solution.

This simple algorithm has been applied to a wide range of problems from parameter fitting in economic models to the design of aircraft wings. One of the most striking examples of the power of blind variation and selection is Adrian Thompson's tone discriminator. By exploiting the subtle physics of a reconfigurable chip (a Field Programmable Gate Array) an evolved design distinguished between two spoken words using only 100 gates: something unthinkable using conventional design. Read more about this from a New Scientist Cover Story. There are other examples where evolutionary methods applied to hardware have produced circuits comparable to those designed by experts and also unconventional circuits in which resources are used extremely efficiently.

Evolving Self-Diagnosing Hardware was first attempted by the author for some toy circuits: a two bit multiplier and a one bit adder. After hundreds of thousands of generations, circuits evolved performing full diagnosis using about half the overhead the conventional solution would have required. For example when using two-input logic-gate technology, a two-bit multiplier can be implemented using 7 gates. Adding an extra copy, and 7 more gates for comparing 4 outputs, we have an overhead of 14 gates for the conventional voting system BIST solution. After four million generations (a months processing time on a single PC) the GA found a circuit (diagram) with the same behaviour using only 9 extra gates. It is hard to work out exactly what operating principles underlie its operation but it looks like it tends to use more XOR gates which always propagate a bit flip in one of their inputs, and also exploits design diversity to compare multiple sections of the circuit simultaneously. Many evolved circuits are described and their diagrams can be found in the published papers.

This proves that evolution is capable of reaching areas of design space beyond the scope of conventional design, and also that these areas contain so far unseen efficient solutions, waiting to be plucked. How many such circuits could evolution find better than today's? We believe they are everywhere, and we intend to start searching for them by using a cluster of islands based on contributor's PCs. Why self-diagnosing hardware? It is very hard to design a circuit producing reliable behaviour when faults are thrown at it, which is why human designers have chosen to simply have an extra copy of the whole circuit as a solution. However this is expensive in terms of power and silicon area, the former crucial in space missions and the latter in mass production. The circuits to be given to the cluster to evolve will be of industrial size, such as a Viterbi decoder, which is used inside every mobile phone.

By joining this project you would be making a valuable contribution to exciting research and helping to push the bounds of human knowledge.

[Paratima]

Kinda wordy, this prokaryote person, no?

[prokaryote]

Originally posted by Paratima
Kinda wordy, this prokaryote person, no?

No! See I can answer a question only using one word.... Doh!


p.s. (See my custom title).

[excaliber]

Does it support proxy? I have a box I might put on it, but it relies on HTTP proxy for internet.

Looks kinda difficult to setup as well. Neat idea though

[prokaryote]

Hi excaliber,

Please see This thread for some answers. It's a little bit of a chore to set up, but not too bad.

prok