evolvable hardware and gp paper now available in post script . . . " rapidly reconfigurable field-programmable gate arrays for accelerating fitness evaluation in genetic programming " a late-breaking papers from gp-97 conference . abstract : the dominant component of the computational burden of solving non-trivial problems with evolutionary algorithms is the task of measuring the fitness of each individual in each generation of the evolving population . the advent of rapidly reconfigurable field-programmable gate arrays ( fpgas ) and the idea of evolvable hardware opens the possiblity of embodying each individual of the evolving population into hardware for the purpose of accelerating the time-consuming fitness evaluation task this paper demonstrates how the massive parallelism of the rapidly reconfigurable xilinx xc6216 fpga can be exploited to accelerate the computationally burdensome fitness evaluation task of genetic programming . the work was done on virtual computing corporation 's low-cost hots expansion board for pc type computers . a 16 - step 7 - sorter was evolved that has two fewer steps than the sorting network described in the 1962 o'connor and nelson patent on sorting networks and that has the same number of steps as the minimal 7 - sorter that was devised by floyd and knuth subsequent to the patent . john r . koza forrest h bennett iii jeffrey l . hutchings stephen l . bade martin a . keane david andre published in koza , john r . ( editor ) . late breaking papers at the genetic programming 1997 conference , stanford university , july 13-16 , 1997 . stanford , ca : stanford university bookstore . pages 121 p 131 . available in post script from www at http : / / www-cs - faculty . stanford . edu / ~ koza / john r . koza computer science department 258 gates building mail code 9020 stanford university stanford , california 94305 usa e-mail : koza @ cs . stanford . edu office phone : 650-723 - 1517 ( note new area code of 650 ) home phone : 650-941 - 0336 fax : 650-941 - 9430 www : http : / / www-cs - faculty . stanford . edu / ~ koza / www for gp-98 conference : http : / / www . genetic - programming . org
