3 ms·

Tone detection has an interesting history to say the least. https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-or

• jacquesm 7y ago
  That's not exactly the genesis of the field but it is an interesting story about genetic algorithms and the bit that always got me was how there were parts in there used in ways that no human designer would ever use them and yet they were critical to its functioning. "Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest— with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output— yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type." Still amazing to re-read, and taking this into account it will be a long long time before we can finally say that we have cracked the DNA code and all its gory little details.
  • perl4ever 7y ago
    I always wanted to know what you would get if you developed the same thing, but forced it to deal with different FPGAs during its evolution. Would it still come up with something surprisingly inhuman?
    • jacquesm 7y ago
      That's an experiment worth doing.