A divide-and-conquer approach to evolvable hardware

Evolvable Hardware (EHW) has been proposed as a new method for designing systems for complex real world applications. One of the problems has been that only small systems have been evolvable. This paper indicates some of the aspects in biological systems that are important for evolving complex systems. Further, a divide-and-conquer scheme is proposed, where a system is evolved by evolving smaller subsystems. Experiments show that the number of generations required for evolution by the new method can be substantially reduced compared to evolving a system directly. However, there is no lack of performance in the final system.