A new species of hardware: Ordinary hardware does the same old job until it wears out, whereas evolvable hardware adapts itself to a changing task By: Moshe Sipper, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Edmund M.A. Ronald, Ecole Polytechnique, Center for Applied Mathematics From: IEEE Spectrum - March 2000 - page 62 http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/spectrum/mar00/features/evol.html Tetsuya Higuchi and his colleagues at the Evolvable Systems Laboratory of the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan have built a general-purpose chip for on-line evolvable hardware and used it to implement a controller for an artificial hand controlled by electric pulses from the nerves in the arm muscles. In normal conditions, a disabled person trains for over a month before being able to manipulate a prosthetic hand with ease. Reversing this scenario, Higuchi and his colleagues had the artificial hand adapt itself to the disabled person, instead of having the person adapt to the hand. The idea was that the on-line controller should accept signals from the nerves in the arm and map them to desired hand actions. Because those signals vary greatly between individuals, it is impossible to design such a circuit in advance. But with the evolvable-hardware controller, the hand usually requires less than 10 minutes to adapt to its owner through on-line training, in which the person repeats various hand movements - a notable improvement over the one month required when the owner is the one doing the adapting. Picture caption: Researchers at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan used evolvable hardware to develop a prototype artificial hand that adapts to a patient's unique arm-muscle activity. Typically, the adaptation is the other way arround: people control the hand by learning to modify their muscle activity. http://www.etl.go.jp/etl/divisions/~ehw/eng/noframe/main.html http://www.etl.go.jp/etl/divisions/~ehw/common/gishu/gishu.html