ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the main ideas expressed in this book. By contrasting evolutionary and conventional design, we show that the former is a promising alternative for modern electronics. We also describe the state of development of programmable chips, a key technology for Evolvable Hardware. We remark that Evolutionary Computation may have an impact in the relevance of two branches of electronics: analog and digital. Finally, we point out that the evolutionary design of fault tolerance systems is one of the most important topics of research in
9.1 EVOLUTIONARY AND CONVENTIONAL DESIGN
Evolutionary design is based on a parallel search in a large space of possible solutions to a particular problem. This search is driven by the use of evolutionary inspired operators, such as selection, crossover, and mutation. Conventional design is based on mathematical formalism, heuristics, approximated physical models, and also on human experience and intuition.
