Unconventional Machines: Architecture, Design and Computation
Keywords: Vast Parallel Architectures, Bio-Inspired Hardware and Methods, Artificial Development, Evolutionary Computation, Evolvable Hardware, bio-inspired, Artificial Life, cellular computing, cellular automata, artificial self-replication, reconfigurable hardware.
We do research related to parallel machines and massive parallel processing. The target for our research is toward a future of massive parallelism. To address the challenge of achieving increased parallelism, way beyond today's computers, we have taken an approach toward unconventional machines. Vast parallel machines exploring the possibility of computation out of a vast number of simple computing elements with only local communication is our main and unifying theme.
Machine design and specification we are interested in how such unconventional machines can be designed and constructed. Currently, we are attempting to merge evolutionary algorithms with artificial development. This results in truly adaptive machines that inherently include properties like self-assembly and self-reconfiguration. Our preferred prototyping technology is FPGAs, and we use a number of in-house designed, high-speed, parallel cellular experimental machines for our daily research.
Computational Materials
“Evolution in Materio” or “Computational Materials”. Research is aimed at investigating materials not commonly considered as a substrate for computation. At the moment the research is initialized by Julian Miller (University of York (UK)), Mike Petty (Durham University (UK)) and Gunnar Tufte.
People:
Gunnar Tufte. Intrests: all keywords, but works at the moment mostly on Artificial Development of cellular machines and Evolution In Materio (new, in collaboration with Julian Miller). Gunnar is the main contact persom.
Dragana Laketic. Intrests: Complex Adaptive Systems, Bio-inspired Computing, Life as It Could Be.
Konstantinos Antonakopoulos. Intrests: Artificial development.
Stefano Nichele. Intrests: Bio-inspired computation, Cellular automata, Genetic algorithms, Artificial development.
(Sorry, page under construction.)