Evolutionary computer improves its hardware with genetic algorithms

Techies at the University of Oslo have built an evolutionary computer that changes its design using genetic algorithms to improve performance:

What their hardware does is par up "genes" in the hardware to find the hardware design that is the most effective to accomplish the tasks at hand. Just like in the real world it can take 20 to 30 thousand generations before the system finds the perfect design to solve the problem, but this will happen in just a few seconds compared to the 8-900.000 years it took humans to go through the same number of generations.

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(via Futurismic)