Mecobo: A Hardware and Software Platform for In Materio Evolution

Lykkebø, Odd Rune; Harding, Simon; Tufte, Gunnar; Miller, Julian F.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-08123-6_22

Cited by 26 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…• Digital acquisition cards together with programmable switch arrays [8] • Mbed microcontrollers with digital to analogue converters [33] • Purpose built platforms [31,3] …”

Section: Materials and Interfaces Used Within Nascencementioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution in Nanomaterio: The NASCENCE Project

Broersma

2017

Inspired by Nature

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This chapter describes some of the work that was carried out by members of the NASCENCE project, an FP7 project sponsored by the European Community. Apart from some historical notes and background material, the chapter explains how nanoscale material systems have been configured to perform computational tasks by finding appropriate configuration signals using artificial evolution. Most of this exposition is centred around the work that has been carried out at the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology at the University of Twente using disordered networks of nanoparticles. The interested reader will also find many pointers to references that contain more details on work that has been carried out by other members of the NASCENCE consortium on composite materials based on single-walled carbon nanotubes.

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“…• Digital acquisition cards together with programmable switch arrays [8] • Mbed microcontrollers with digital to analogue converters [33] • Purpose built platforms [31,3] …”

Section: Materials and Interfaces Used Within Nascencementioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution in Nanomaterio: The NASCENCE Project

Broersma

2017

Inspired by Nature

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“…Mecobo includes a flexible software platform including hardware drivers, support of multiple programming languages and the possibility to connect to hardware over the internet. This makes Mecobo a highly flexible platform for EIM experimentation [8].…”

Section: Mecobo Hardware Platformmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this paper, we describe the use of a purpose built platform called Mecobo that facilitates computer controlled evolution of a material (the hardware is described in detail in [8]). The Mecobo platform has been developed within an EU funded research project called NASCENCE [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution-In-Materio: Solving Machine Learning Classification Problems Using Materials

Mohid

Miller

Harding

et al. 2014

Parallel Problem Solving From Nature – PPSN XIII

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Abstract. Evolution-in-materio (EIM) is a method that uses artificial evolution to exploit the properties of physical matter to solve computational problems without requiring a detailed understanding of such properties. EIM has so far been applied to very few computational problems. We show that using a purpose-built hardware platform called Mecobo, it is possible to evolve voltages and signals applied to physical materials to solve machine learning classification problems. This is the first time that EIM has been applied to such problems. We evaluate the approach on two standard datasets: Lenses and Iris. Comparing our technique with a well-known software-based evolutionary method indicates that EIM performs reasonably well. We suggest that EIM offers a promising new direction for evolutionary computation.

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“…EA and software stack, is as important as the hardware. Mecobo includes a flexible software platform including hardware drivers, support of multiple programming languages and a possibility to connect to hardware over the internet makes Mecobo a highly flexible platform for EIM experimentation [10].…”

Section: Mecobo: An Evolution-in-materio Hardware Platformmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this paper, we describe the use of a purpose built platform called Mecobo that facilitates computer controlled evolution of a material [10] for solving a computational problem. The Mecobo platform has been developed within an EU funded research project called NASCENCE [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution-in-materio: Solving function optimization problems using materials

Mohid

Miller

Harding

et al. 2014

2014 14th UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence (UKCI)

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Abstract-Evolution-in-materio (EIM) is a method that uses artificial evolution to exploit properties of materials to solve computational problems without requiring a detailed understanding of such properties. In this paper, we show that using a purpose-built hardware platform called Mecobo, it is possible to evolve voltages and signals applied to physical materials to solve computational problems. We demonstrate for the first time that this methodology can be applied to function optimization. We evaluate the approach on 23 function optimization benchmarks and in some cases results come very close to the global optimum or even surpass those provided by a well-known software-based evolutionary approach. This indicates that EIM has promise and further investigations would be fruitful.

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Mecobo: A Hardware and Software Platform for In Materio Evolution

Cited by 26 publications

References 10 publications

Evolution in Nanomaterio: The NASCENCE Project

Evolution in Nanomaterio: The NASCENCE Project

Evolution-In-Materio: Solving Machine Learning Classification Problems Using Materials

Evolution-in-materio: Solving function optimization problems using materials

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