Evolution In Materio: Evolving Logic Gates in Liquid Crystal.

Abstract

Abstract. Intrinsic evolution has been shown to be capable of exploiting the physical properties of materials to solve problems, however most researchers have chosen to limit themselves to using standard electronic components. However, these components are human designed and intentionally have predictable responses, so they may not be the most suitable physical devices to use when using a stochastic search technique. Indeed allowing computer controlled evolution (CCE) to manipulate novel physical media might allow much greater scope for the discovery of unconventional solutions. Last year the authors demonstrated, for the first time, that CCE could manipulate liquid crystal to perform computational tasks (i.e frequency discrimination, robot control). In this paper, we demonstrate that it is also possible to evolve logic gates in liquid crystal. 1