News Circuit design evolving in distributed digital world

From New Scientist:

A digital simulation of natural selection, taking place in scores of internet-linked personal computers, is being used to evolve superior electronic circuits.

The calculations used to improve circuit design would normally be performed on a single powerful computer or a large cluster of machines. But Miguel Garvie, a research student at the University of Sussex in the UK, has developed software that lets ordinary computer users contribute their spare processing power to create a virtual evolutionary environment for the project.

Such "distributed computing" is already providing cheap but substantial computer power to the search for alien messages in radio signals from space and to the quest for the largest prime numbers.

In the five days since the project was launched, Garvie says he has evolved circuits that outperform commercial designs on standard tests by 100 per cent but are only 50 per cent larger.

"It's gone as far as conventional circuits and beyond," he told New Scientist. "The plan is to go with bigger and bigger circuits, which is why I started the distributed project."

Full article here

 

what they should do to intice people into this, because lets face it large coorporations will inevitably use it in the long run. they should if you give up lets say four hours of processing time a day, while your sleeping maybe, they should in return give you free broadband access. its costing less and less to put people online, and supper computers are costing more and more. so why not let the consumer buy the computers, i believe it could be a worthwhile alternative.

 

I think they need to overcome a major hurdle first which is getting enough public interest to get more people using it. I'm running it now, but I look at the stats and there's about 200 users in total (a few of which are almost certainly the university's computers). I think to get the interest they need a nice looking website and a Windows GUI. I think even a lot of hardcore bit-techers will be put off by the lack of those features.

 

I seriously doubt they can afford to give people free broadband. Maybe something like 1p per hour of CPU time donated. That's a little more realistic. It would actually probably measured by units of work done so people with fast processors get more cash .

 

renting a 2GHz pc would cost you a month around £80, let's say you give 6 hours a day (or at night more likelly) thats £20. wholesale broadband is £10 a month. it can be done, but if it will it'll be done by coorporations with top secret research, which could then be decoded and stolen more easely

 

OMG WTF?! The stats are totally screwed. When I went to bed last night I'd tried 160000 circuits which was about 80000 a day since it was past midnight. This morning apparently I've tried 60 something circuits?!