Evolving diverse hardwares using speciated genetic algorithm

Evolvable hardware (EHW) has become an attractive topic recently because such hardware can reconfigure itself to adapt to the environment it is embedded in. EHW uses a genetic algorithm (GA), which is one of the evolutionary algorithms, to search for the goal hardware. In this paper, we propose EHW using a speciated GA that can evolve diverse circuits with single-step evolution. The speciation algorithm helps to find diverse solutions as the result of the evolution, and maintains the diversity during the evolution. We have applied a fitness-sharing method for speciation to the EHW of a 6-multiplexer, and have obtained diverse hardware structures. Also, we have found a circuit in 35% less generations than we did with a conventional genetic algorithm.