A phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and epigenetic view of bio-inspired hardware systems

Abstract

Abstract-If one considers life on Earth since its very beginning, three levels of organization can be distinguished: the phylogenetic level concerns the temporal evolution of the genetic programs within individuals and species, the ontogenetic level concerns the developmental process of a single multicellular organism, and the epigenetic level concerns the learning processes during an individual organism's lifetime. In analogy to nature, the space of bio-inspired hardware systems can be partitioned along these three axes, phylogeny, ontogeny, and epigenesis, giving rise to the POE model. This paper is an exposition and examination of bio-inspired systems within the POE framework, with our goals being: 1) to present an overview of current-day research, 2) to demonstrate that the POE model can be used to classify bioinspired systems, and 3) to identify possible directions for future research, derived from a POE outlook. We first discuss each of the three axes separately, considering the systems created to date and plotting directions for continued progress along the axis in question. We end our exposition by a discussion of possible research directions, involving the construction of bio-inspired systems that are situated along two, and ultimately all three axes. This could give rise to novel systems endowed with evolutionary, reproductive, regenerative, and learning capabilities.

Experiments on the Automatic Evolution of Protocols Using Genetic Programming

“…Although GP has been mostly applied to off-line solution of problems, it has also been used to evolve new programs at run-time, in domains such as evolvable hardware [3] and robotics [4,5]. However, to the best of our knowledge, on-line evolution of networking protocol code has not been tried yet.…”

Cooperative agent-based SANET architecture for personalised healthcare monitoring

“…It is designed to bind a compatibility space and allow legacy devices to interface with the environment. SANETs architectures for healthcare monitoring need to be service-oriented for composition, configuration and integration so the application can be designed efficiently from the data model, so the biomimetic model perspective can be projected onto a three dimensional space based on the POE Classification Model [1][2] [20] as elaborated in Table 1. The POE model represents the different levels of organization, with POE standing for Phylogeny, Ontogeny and Epigenesis.…”

MOVE Processors That Self-replicate and Differentiate

“…Bio-inspiration in the design of digital hardware finds its source in essentially three biological models [9,10]: Phylogenesis (P), the history of the evolution of the species through time, Ontogenesis (O), the development of an individual as directed by his genetic code, from its first cell to the full organism, and Epigenesis (E), the development of an individual through learning processes. All of these models, to a greater or lesser extent have been used as a source of inspiration for the development of computing machines (such as the ontogenesis in the Embryonics project or epigenesis for artificial neural networks) but before the POEtic project [1,2], no hardware substrate had been developed that could combine the three axes of bio-inspiration into one single circuit.…”