Adrian went on to evolve circuits with the IC in a freezer, on the bench, and on a hot plate to try to avoid temperature-dependent effects. The GA didn’t know i

Adrian went on to evolve circuits with the IC in a freezer, on the bench, and on a hot plate to try to avoid temperature-dependent effects. The GA didn’t know it was supposed to be temperature invariant, or that it was supposed to use the gates as digital devices. Often, the evolved FPGA program would not work on another chip of the same device, because it overfit to the exact chip(s) it evolved on. I was in this group under Phil Husbands at Sussex as a youngster and it was the most stimulating intellectual environment. We had GAs optimize recurrent NNs for robot control, and then had to figure out how they worked, on SPARC stations in 1994. But this ‘nouveau AI’ suffered the AI winter along with the GOFAI we rejected, partially because of the interesting difficulties this team discovered. It was cool seeing these ideas revived 25 years later, with a million times more compute.