14 ms·

In a sense, Adrian Thompson kicked this off in the 90's when he applied an evolutionary algorithm to FPGA hardware. Using a "survival of the fittest" approach,

In a sense, Adrian Thompson kicked this off in the 90's when he applied an evolutionary algorithm to FPGA hardware. Using a "survival of the fittest" approach, he taught a board to discern the difference between a 1kHz and 10KHz tone. The final generation of the circuit was more compact than anything a human engineer would ever come up with (reducible to a mere 37 logic gates), and utilized all kinds of physical nuances specific to the chip it evolved on - including feedback loops, EMI effects between unconnected logic units, and (if I recall) operating transistors outside their saturation region. Article: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ Paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2737441_An_Evolved_Circuit_Intrinsic_in_Silicon_Entwined_With_Physics https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2737441_An_Evolved_... Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2t5ozk/what_ever_happened_with_the_evolutionary/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2t5ozk/wha...

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
I remember talking about this with my friend and fellow EE grad Connor a few years ago. The chip's design really feels like a biological approach to electrical engineering, in the way that all of the layers we humans like to neatly organize our concepts into just get totally upended and messed with.
- pharrington 2y ago
  Biology also uses tons of redundancy and error correction that the generative algorithm approach lacks.
  - remexre 2y ago
    Though, the algorithm might plausibly evolve it if it were trained in a more hostile environment.
Terr_ 2y ago
IIRC the flip-side was that it was hideously specific to a particular model and batch of hardware, because it relied on something that would otherwise be considered a manufacturing flaw.
- svilen_dobrev 2y ago
  long time ago, maybe in russian journal "Radio" ~198x, there was someone there describing that if one gets certain transistor from particular batch of particular factory/date, and connect it in whatever weird way, will make a full FM radio (or similar-complex-thing).. because they've wronged the yields. No idea how they had figured that out. But mistakes aside, what would it be if the chips from the factory could learn / fine-tune how to work (better) , on the run..
  - genewitch 2y ago
    AM radio can be "detected" with a semiconductor, so this kinda makes sense if you squint. If you can find it, someday, update this!
    - genewitch 2y ago
      you can detect FM with an AM radio - "slope detection". This was in the back of my head when i typed this comment. A memory of picking up KFI on a tooth filling when licking the lid from a pudding when i was a kid. I had the real silver colored fillings. I used to get zapped, every time, and it was painful. It had to have been the semi-conductive amalgam, my arms acting as a dipole, and my skull and body the ground plane. But ancillary to that, i remembered the little electronic hobby kits we had, and a wire, a resistor, and a speaker was about all you needed to hear KNX 1070, a clear channel broadcast AM station in Orange County, CA.
  - yetihehe 2y ago
    At my highschool, we had FM radio transmitter on the other side of street. Pretty often you could hear one of the stations in computer speakers in library, so FM radio can be detected by simple analog circuits.
quanto 2y ago
Fascinating paper. Thanks for the ref. Operating transistors outside the linear region (the saturated "on") on a billion+ scale is something that we as engineers and physicists haven't quite figured out, and I am hoping that this changes in future, especially with the advent of analog neuromorphic computing. The quadratic region (before the "on") is far more energy efficient and the non-linearity could actually help with computing, not unlike the activation function in an NN. Of course, the modeling the nonlinear behavior is difficult. My prof would say for every coefficient in SPICE's transistor models, someone dedicated his entire PhD (and there are a lot of these coefficients!). I haven't been in touch with the field since I moved up the stack (numerical analysis/ML) I would love to learn more if there has been recent progress in this field.
- ImHereToVote 2y ago
  I believe neuromorphic spiking hardware will be the step to truly revolutionize the field of anthropod contagion issues.
  - trainsarebetter 2y ago
    Can’t tell if this is a joke or not
    - burnished 2y ago
      I came in already knowing what neuromorphic hardware is and I'm also unsure
      - fouc 2y ago
        joke I think, anthropod is probably another way of saying bugs/ants haha
        burnished 2y ago
        Oh christ you're right, they were actually being really funny. I was being super literal and imagined them being very excited about futuristic advances in giant isopod diagnosis and care
userbinator 2y ago
That's exactly what I thought of too when I saw the title. Basically brute force + gradient descent.
alexpotato 2y ago
I read the damn interesting post back when it came out and seeing the title of the post immediately led me to thinking of Thompson's post as well.
breatheoften 2y ago
I remember this paper being discussed in the novel "Science of Discworld" -- a super interesting book involving collaboration between a fiction author and some real world scientists -- where the fictional characters in the novel discover our universe and its rules ... I always thought there was some deep insight to be had about the universe within this paper. Now moreso I think the unexpectedness says something instead about the nature of engineering and control and human mechanisms for understanding these sorts of systems ... -- sort of by definition human engineering relies on linearized approximations to characterize the effects being manipulated -- so something which operates in modes far outside those models is basically inscrutable. I think that's kind of expected but the results still provoke the fascination to ponder the solutions super human engineering methods might yet find with the modern technical substrates.
- thirdtruck 2y ago
  Xe highly recommend the series! Xe keep going back to them for bedtime audio book listening. Chapters alternate between fact and fiction and the mix of intriguing narrative and drier but compelling academic talk help put xir otherwise overly busy mind to rest. In fact, xe bought softcover copies of two of them just last week. The science is no longer cutting edge (some are over twenty years old) but the deeper principles hold and Discworld makes for an excellent foil to our own Roundworld, just as Sir Pratchett intended. Indeed, the series says more about us as humans and our relationship to the universe than the universe itself and xe love that.
viccis 2y ago
I really wish I still had the link, but there used to be a website that listed a bunch of times in which machine learning was used (mostly via reinforcement learning) to teach a computer how to play a video game and it ended up using perverse strategies that no human would do. Like exploiting weird glitches (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meE5aaRJ0Zs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meE5aaRJ0Zs shows this with Q*bert) Closest I've found to the old list I used to go to is this: https://heystacks.com/doc/186/specification-gaming-examples-in-ai---master-list https://heystacks.com/doc/186/specification-gaming-examples-...
- porridgeraisin 2y ago
  The recent nvidia AI cuda engineer was also similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113941
- robertjpayne 2y ago
  Make no mistake most humans will exploit any glitches and bugs they can find for personal advantage in game. It’s just machines can exploit timing bugs better.
  - Muromec 2y ago
    Some people are able to do frame perfect inputs semi consistently from what I understand. I don’t understand how, as my own performance is around hitting 100ms window once, every other time
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Maybe they have better equipment? If you're using a typical PC (or $deity forbid, a phone) with a typical consumer OS, there's several sources of variability between your controller and the visual feedback you receive from the game, each of which could randomly introduce delays on the order of milliseconds or more. That "randomly" here is the key phrase - lag itself is not a problem, the variability is.
codr7 2y ago
And this is the kind of technology we use to decide if someone should get a loan, or if something is a human about to be run over by a car. I think I'm going to simply climb up a tree and wait this one out. What if it invented a new kind of human, or a different kind of running over?
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? The origin of circuits (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099226 - Sept 2018 (25 comments) On the Origin of Circuits: GA Exploits FPGA Batch to Solve Problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17134600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17134600 - May 2018 (1 comment) On the Origin of Circuits (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9885558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9885558 - July 2015 (12 comments) An evolved circuit, intrinsic in silicon, entwined with physics (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923902 - Jan 2015 (1 comment) On the Origin of Circuits (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8890167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8890167 - Jan 2015 (1 comment) That's not a lot of discussion—we should have another thread about this sometime. If you want to submit it in (say) a week or two, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.
- Retr0id 2y ago
  Did something funky happen to the timestamps in this thread? I could've sworn I was reading it last night (~12h ago)
  - dang 2y ago
    It looks like we put the thread in HN's second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it got re-upped and given a random slot on the frontpage. The relativized timestamps are an artifact of the re-upping system. There are past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20timestamps%20re-up&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Sorry for the confusion! I know it's weird but the alternative turns out to be even more confusing and we've never figured out how to square that circle.
  - skissane 2y ago
    I think dang did something manual to push it back to the frontpage, and that reset the timestamps on everyone’s existing comments… There is a comment here by me which says “2 hours ago”, I swear I wrote it longer ago than that - indeed, my threads page still says I wrote it 20 hours ago, so it is like part of the code knows when I really wrote it, another part now thinks I wrote it 18 hours later than I did…
cgcrob 2y ago
Relying on nuances of the abstraction and undefined or variable characteristics sounds like a very very bad idea to me. The one thing you generally want for circuits is reproducibility.
- mcmoor 2y ago
  Yeah also given that I don't know any further attempts to do this, looks like it remains just an intellectual curiosity.
huxley 2y ago
“More compact than anything a human engineer would ever come up with” … sounds more like they built an artificial Steve Wozniak
mk_stjames 2y ago
I've referenced this paper many times here; it's easily in my top 10 of papers I've ever read. It's one of those ones that, if you go into it blind, you have several "Oh no f'king way" moments. The interesting thing to me now is... that research is very much a product of the right time. The specific Xilinx FPGA he was using was incredibly simple by today's standards and this is actually what allowed it to work so well. It was 5v, and from what I remember, the binary bitstream to program it was either completely documented, or he was able to easily generate the bitstreams by studying the output of the Xilinx router- in that era Xilinx had a manual PnR tool where you could physically draw how the blocks connected by hand if you wanted. All the blocks were the same and laid out physically how you'd expect. And the important part is that you couldn't brick the chip with an invalid binary bitstream programming. So if a generation made something wonky, it still configured the chip and ran it, no harm. Most all, if not all modern FPGAs just cannot be programmed like this anymore. Just randomly mutating a bitstream would, at best, make an invalid binary that the chip just won't burn. Or, at worst, brick it.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
cyanydeez 2y ago
So, the future is reliance on undefined but reproducible behavior Not sure that's working out well for democracy
jccalhoun 2y ago
I should have read the comments because I just spent 20 minutes trying to find the article in Discover magazine about this exact thing: https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/evolving-a-conscious-machine https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/evolving-a-consc... The part that I always remember is that if they changed the temperature in the room by a couple degrees the chip would stop working.
markisus 2y ago
The interesting thing about this project is that it shouldn’t even be possible if the chip behaved as an abstract logical circuit since then it would simply implement a finite automation. You must abuse the underlying physics to make the logic gates behave like something else.
- rini17 2y ago
  Abstract logical circuits are still leaky abstractions, for example hazards are possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_(logic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_(logic) Yes you can go even more abstract and ignore time flow completely and have pure boolean logic, but then it can't be practically implemented at all.
bhouston 2y ago
Yup, was coming here to basically say the same thing. Amazing innovations happen when you let a computer just do arbitrary optimization/hill climbing. Now, you can impose additional constraints to the problem if you want to keep it using transistors properly or to not use EM side effects, etc. This headline is mostly engagement bait as it is first nothing new and second, it is actually fully controllable.
ivanmontillam 2y ago
Reminds of disassembled executables, unintelligible to the untrained eye. It's even more convoluted when also re-interpreted into C language. Designs nobody would ever come up with, but equivalent and even with compiler tricks we'd not have known.
pjs_ 2y ago
A classic. What's old is new again
gnarbarian 2y ago
classic thank you! I've been trying to find this recently. I first heard about this in my genetic algorithms class more than 15 years ago.
kjs3 2y ago
Thompson is who I immediately thought of. Thanks for digging up the actual cite.

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago

I remember talking about this with my friend and fellow EE grad Connor a few years ago. The chip's design really feels like a biological approach to electrical engineering, in the way that all of the layers we humans like to neatly organize our concepts into just get totally upended and messed with.

pharrington 2y ago
Biology also uses tons of redundancy and error correction that the generative algorithm approach lacks.
- remexre 2y ago
  Though, the algorithm might plausibly evolve it if it were trained in a more hostile environment.

Terr_ 2y ago

IIRC the flip-side was that it was hideously specific to a particular model and batch of hardware, because it relied on something that would otherwise be considered a manufacturing flaw.

svilen_dobrev 2y ago
long time ago, maybe in russian journal "Radio" ~198x, there was someone there describing that if one gets certain transistor from particular batch of particular factory/date, and connect it in whatever weird way, will make a full FM radio (or similar-complex-thing).. because they've wronged the yields. No idea how they had figured that out. But mistakes aside, what would it be if the chips from the factory could learn / fine-tune how to work (better) , on the run..
- genewitch 2y ago
  AM radio can be "detected" with a semiconductor, so this kinda makes sense if you squint. If you can find it, someday, update this!
  - genewitch 2y ago
    you can detect FM with an AM radio - "slope detection". This was in the back of my head when i typed this comment. A memory of picking up KFI on a tooth filling when licking the lid from a pudding when i was a kid. I had the real silver colored fillings. I used to get zapped, every time, and it was painful. It had to have been the semi-conductive amalgam, my arms acting as a dipole, and my skull and body the ground plane. But ancillary to that, i remembered the little electronic hobby kits we had, and a wire, a resistor, and a speaker was about all you needed to hear KNX 1070, a clear channel broadcast AM station in Orange County, CA.
- yetihehe 2y ago
  At my highschool, we had FM radio transmitter on the other side of street. Pretty often you could hear one of the stations in computer speakers in library, so FM radio can be detected by simple analog circuits.

quanto 2y ago

Fascinating paper. Thanks for the ref. Operating transistors outside the linear region (the saturated "on") on a billion+ scale is something that we as engineers and physicists haven't quite figured out, and I am hoping that this changes in future, especially with the advent of analog neuromorphic computing. The quadratic region (before the "on") is far more energy efficient and the non-linearity could actually help with computing, not unlike the activation function in an NN. Of course, the modeling the nonlinear behavior is difficult. My prof would say for every coefficient in SPICE's transistor models, someone dedicated his entire PhD (and there are a lot of these coefficients!). I haven't been in touch with the field since I moved up the stack (numerical analysis/ML) I would love to learn more if there has been recent progress in this field.

ImHereToVote 2y ago
I believe neuromorphic spiking hardware will be the step to truly revolutionize the field of anthropod contagion issues.
- trainsarebetter 2y ago
  Can’t tell if this is a joke or not
  - burnished 2y ago
    I came in already knowing what neuromorphic hardware is and I'm also unsure
    - fouc 2y ago
      joke I think, anthropod is probably another way of saying bugs/ants haha
      - burnished 2y ago
        Oh christ you're right, they were actually being really funny. I was being super literal and imagined them being very excited about futuristic advances in giant isopod diagnosis and care

userbinator 2y ago

That's exactly what I thought of too when I saw the title. Basically brute force + gradient descent.

alexpotato 2y ago

I read the damn interesting post back when it came out and seeing the title of the post immediately led me to thinking of Thompson's post as well.

breatheoften 2y ago

I remember this paper being discussed in the novel "Science of Discworld" -- a super interesting book involving collaboration between a fiction author and some real world scientists -- where the fictional characters in the novel discover our universe and its rules ... I always thought there was some deep insight to be had about the universe within this paper. Now moreso I think the unexpectedness says something instead about the nature of engineering and control and human mechanisms for understanding these sorts of systems ... -- sort of by definition human engineering relies on linearized approximations to characterize the effects being manipulated -- so something which operates in modes far outside those models is basically inscrutable. I think that's kind of expected but the results still provoke the fascination to ponder the solutions super human engineering methods might yet find with the modern technical substrates.

thirdtruck 2y ago
Xe highly recommend the series! Xe keep going back to them for bedtime audio book listening. Chapters alternate between fact and fiction and the mix of intriguing narrative and drier but compelling academic talk help put xir otherwise overly busy mind to rest. In fact, xe bought softcover copies of two of them just last week. The science is no longer cutting edge (some are over twenty years old) but the deeper principles hold and Discworld makes for an excellent foil to our own Roundworld, just as Sir Pratchett intended. Indeed, the series says more about us as humans and our relationship to the universe than the universe itself and xe love that.

viccis 2y ago

I really wish I still had the link, but there used to be a website that listed a bunch of times in which machine learning was used (mostly via reinforcement learning) to teach a computer how to play a video game and it ended up using perverse strategies that no human would do. Like exploiting weird glitches (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meE5aaRJ0Zs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meE5aaRJ0Zs shows this with Q*bert) Closest I've found to the old list I used to go to is this: https://heystacks.com/doc/186/specification-gaming-examples-in-ai---master-list https://heystacks.com/doc/186/specification-gaming-examples-...

porridgeraisin 2y ago
The recent nvidia AI cuda engineer was also similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113941
robertjpayne 2y ago
Make no mistake most humans will exploit any glitches and bugs they can find for personal advantage in game. It’s just machines can exploit timing bugs better.
- Muromec 2y ago
  Some people are able to do frame perfect inputs semi consistently from what I understand. I don’t understand how, as my own performance is around hitting 100ms window once, every other time
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Maybe they have better equipment? If you're using a typical PC (or $deity forbid, a phone) with a typical consumer OS, there's several sources of variability between your controller and the visual feedback you receive from the game, each of which could randomly introduce delays on the order of milliseconds or more. That "randomly" here is the key phrase - lag itself is not a problem, the variability is.

codr7 2y ago

And this is the kind of technology we use to decide if someone should get a loan, or if something is a human about to be run over by a car. I think I'm going to simply climb up a tree and wait this one out. What if it invented a new kind of human, or a different kind of running over?

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? The origin of circuits (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099226 - Sept 2018 (25 comments) On the Origin of Circuits: GA Exploits FPGA Batch to Solve Problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17134600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17134600 - May 2018 (1 comment) On the Origin of Circuits (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9885558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9885558 - July 2015 (12 comments) An evolved circuit, intrinsic in silicon, entwined with physics (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923902 - Jan 2015 (1 comment) On the Origin of Circuits (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8890167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8890167 - Jan 2015 (1 comment) That's not a lot of discussion—we should have another thread about this sometime. If you want to submit it in (say) a week or two, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.

Retr0id 2y ago
Did something funky happen to the timestamps in this thread? I could've sworn I was reading it last night (~12h ago)
- dang 2y ago
  It looks like we put the thread in HN's second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it got re-upped and given a random slot on the frontpage. The relativized timestamps are an artifact of the re-upping system. There are past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20timestamps%20re-up&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Sorry for the confusion! I know it's weird but the alternative turns out to be even more confusing and we've never figured out how to square that circle.
- skissane 2y ago
  I think dang did something manual to push it back to the frontpage, and that reset the timestamps on everyone’s existing comments… There is a comment here by me which says “2 hours ago”, I swear I wrote it longer ago than that - indeed, my threads page still says I wrote it 20 hours ago, so it is like part of the code knows when I really wrote it, another part now thinks I wrote it 18 hours later than I did…

cgcrob 2y ago

Relying on nuances of the abstraction and undefined or variable characteristics sounds like a very very bad idea to me. The one thing you generally want for circuits is reproducibility.

mcmoor 2y ago
Yeah also given that I don't know any further attempts to do this, looks like it remains just an intellectual curiosity.

huxley 2y ago

“More compact than anything a human engineer would ever come up with” … sounds more like they built an artificial Steve Wozniak

mk_stjames 2y ago

I've referenced this paper many times here; it's easily in my top 10 of papers I've ever read. It's one of those ones that, if you go into it blind, you have several "Oh no f'king way" moments. The interesting thing to me now is... that research is very much a product of the right time. The specific Xilinx FPGA he was using was incredibly simple by today's standards and this is actually what allowed it to work so well. It was 5v, and from what I remember, the binary bitstream to program it was either completely documented, or he was able to easily generate the bitstreams by studying the output of the Xilinx router- in that era Xilinx had a manual PnR tool where you could physically draw how the blocks connected by hand if you wanted. All the blocks were the same and laid out physically how you'd expect. And the important part is that you couldn't brick the chip with an invalid binary bitstream programming. So if a generation made something wonky, it still configured the chip and ran it, no harm. Most all, if not all modern FPGAs just cannot be programmed like this anymore. Just randomly mutating a bitstream would, at best, make an invalid binary that the chip just won't burn. Or, at worst, brick it.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

cyanydeez 2y ago

So, the future is reliance on undefined but reproducible behavior Not sure that's working out well for democracy

jccalhoun 2y ago

I should have read the comments because I just spent 20 minutes trying to find the article in Discover magazine about this exact thing: https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/evolving-a-conscious-machine https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/evolving-a-consc... The part that I always remember is that if they changed the temperature in the room by a couple degrees the chip would stop working.

markisus 2y ago

The interesting thing about this project is that it shouldn’t even be possible if the chip behaved as an abstract logical circuit since then it would simply implement a finite automation. You must abuse the underlying physics to make the logic gates behave like something else.

rini17 2y ago
Abstract logical circuits are still leaky abstractions, for example hazards are possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_(logic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_(logic) Yes you can go even more abstract and ignore time flow completely and have pure boolean logic, but then it can't be practically implemented at all.

bhouston 2y ago

Yup, was coming here to basically say the same thing. Amazing innovations happen when you let a computer just do arbitrary optimization/hill climbing. Now, you can impose additional constraints to the problem if you want to keep it using transistors properly or to not use EM side effects, etc. This headline is mostly engagement bait as it is first nothing new and second, it is actually fully controllable.

ivanmontillam 2y ago

Reminds of disassembled executables, unintelligible to the untrained eye. It's even more convoluted when also re-interpreted into C language. Designs nobody would ever come up with, but equivalent and even with compiler tricks we'd not have known.

pjs_ 2y ago

A classic. What's old is new again

gnarbarian 2y ago

classic thank you! I've been trying to find this recently. I first heard about this in my genetic algorithms class more than 15 years ago.

kjs3 2y ago

Thompson is who I immediately thought of. Thanks for digging up the actual cite.