Apparently, I’d been living under a rock for the past five years, but I didn’t even realize there were kids out there making hardware using GAs. I went to Korea House with this one last night and he set me straight. It’s kind of neat to think that you can make a cluster of computers produce a chip by evolving hardware to meet some conditions. While I think that doing an FPU this way would be effectively impossible using conventional hardware, what if quantum computers were used? I haven’t worked out the math yet, but it should be possible. I should note that I became kind of obsessed with GAs for a while when I was in college. I solved the famous N-Queens problem using one as an undergraduate, and was fairly amused by not understanding how they work, but seeing that on average they’re faster than conventional exhaustive solutions. It’s interesting to think of designing hardware this way, but I think it could scare some people to think of computers automatically designing hardware. Don’t be scared though, the process isn’t all that automatic.