Radio emerges from the electronic soup
19:00 28 August 02
Duncan Graham-Rowe
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992732
A self-organising electronic circuit has stunned engineers by turning itself into a radio receiver.
What should have been an oscillator became a radio
This accidental reinvention of the radio followed an experiment to see if an automated design process, that uses an evolutionary computer program, could be used to "breed" an electronic circuit called an oscillator. An oscillator produces a repetitive electronic signal, usually in the form of a sine wave.
Paul Layzell and Jon Bird at the University of Sussex in Brighton applied the program to a simple arrangement of transistors and found that an oscillating output did indeed evolve.
But when they looked more closely they found that, despite producing an oscillating signal, the circuit itself was not actually an oscillator. Instead, it was behaving more like a radio receiver, picking up a signal from a nearby computer and delivering it as an output.
In essence, the evolving circuit had cheated, relaying oscillations generated elsewhere, rather than generating its own.
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