Programmable logic on chips will be INCREDIBLE for the field of intrinsic hardware evolution, which is a slowly emerging science. This is huge for the field of

Programmable logic on chips will be INCREDIBLE for the field of intrinsic hardware evolution, which is a slowly emerging science. This is huge for the field of AI and electronics. I've been waiting to see this kind of thing for years, ever since I read Adrian Thompson's work on evolution with FPGAs, in which he: "Evolved a tone discriminator using fewer than 40 programmable logic gates and no clock signal in a FPGA" (slides: https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/308/779/an_evolved_circuit_intrinsic_in_silicon_entwined_with_physics.pdf https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/308/779/an_evolved_cir...) EDIT: Full paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50.9691&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50.... The field has crawled along pretty slowly since then as far as I can tell. However, this could be a HUGE thing for computing; developers would finally have a way to create hardware that interacts directly with the physical world in ways we haven't thought of yet. As a small example, Thompson's work revealed circuits that were electromagnetically coupled in novel ways but not connected to the circuit path, yet were required for the circuit to work. Using evolution, in time we should be able to come up with unique solutions to hardware problems not envisaged by human designers. This is really exciting.