414 research outputs found
Immunotronics - novel finite-state-machine architectures with built-in self-test using self-nonself differentiation
A novel approach to hardware fault tolerance is demonstrated that takes inspiration from the human immune system as a method of fault detection. The human immune system is a remarkable system of interacting cells and organs that protect the body from invasion and maintains reliable operation even in the presence of invading bacteria or viruses. This paper seeks to address the field of electronic hardware fault tolerance from an immunological perspective with the aim of showing how novel methods based upon the operation of the immune system can both complement and create new approaches to the development of fault detection mechanisms for reliable hardware systems. In particular, it is shown that by use of partial matching, as prevalent in biological systems, high fault coverage can be achieved with the added advantage of reducing memory requirements. The development of a generic finite-state-machine immunization procedure is discussed that allows any system that can be represented in such a manner to be "immunized" against the occurrence of faulty operation. This is demonstrated by the creation of an immunized decade counter that can detect the presence of faults in real tim
Custom Integrated Circuits
Contains reports on twelve research projects.Analog Devices, Inc.International Business Machines, Inc.Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAL03-86-K-0002)Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAL03-89-C-0001)U.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Grant AFOSR 86-0164)Rockwell International CorporationOKI Semiconductor, Inc.U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-81-K-0742)Charles Stark Draper LaboratoryNational Science Foundation (Grant MIP 84-07285)National Science Foundation (Grant MIP 87-14969)Battelle LaboratoriesNational Science Foundation (Grant MIP 88-14612)DuPont CorporationDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency/U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-87-K-0825)American Telephone and TelegraphDigital Equipment CorporationNational Science Foundation (Grant MIP-88-58764
Cellular Automata
Modelling and simulation are disciplines of major importance for science and engineering. There is no science without models, and simulation has nowadays become a very useful tool, sometimes unavoidable, for development of both science and engineering. The main attractive feature of cellular automata is that, in spite of their conceptual simplicity which allows an easiness of implementation for computer simulation, as a detailed and complete mathematical analysis in principle, they are able to exhibit a wide variety of amazingly complex behaviour. This feature of cellular automata has attracted the researchers' attention from a wide variety of divergent fields of the exact disciplines of science and engineering, but also of the social sciences, and sometimes beyond. The collective complex behaviour of numerous systems, which emerge from the interaction of a multitude of simple individuals, is being conveniently modelled and simulated with cellular automata for very different purposes. In this book, a number of innovative applications of cellular automata models in the fields of Quantum Computing, Materials Science, Cryptography and Coding, and Robotics and Image Processing are presented
Stepping Beyond the Newtonian Paradigm in Biology. Towards an Integrable Model of Life: Accelerating Discovery in the Biological Foundations of Science
The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines
who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative
step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the
world. It is INBIOSAâs purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an
interdisciplinary community of original thinkers.
This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the
transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit
that biology to date has been more fact-oriented and less theoretical than
physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the
science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our
most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from
abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and
demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated
for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology
can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging
new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The
latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known
and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic
means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this
sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort.
The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions
within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the
explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the
abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam;
much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry)
and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized
by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed
are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions ânativeâ to biology
and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as
we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete
and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology
and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge
is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations
that is truly native to living systems.
Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically
recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted
Newtonian mechanics.
This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to
apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between
multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the
basic terms or tools needed.
The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set
of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its
early stages, this will seem to be a ânew scienceâ.
This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information
and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology
and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological,
ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science
of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to
be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic
information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic
systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that
there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at
this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches
to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows.
Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical
problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting
Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge
we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to
formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have
today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists
in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time
in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory
of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary
problems and multiple domains spanning both âhardâ and
âsoftâ sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated
mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project
proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability
of our approach to address âwicked problemsâ which span across physics,
chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions
require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as âgrand
challengesâ to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal
for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the
INBIOSA program.
The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging
research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The
efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently.
Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and
measured as it progresses
The Physics of Open Ended Evolution
abstract: What makes living systems different than non-living ones? Unfortunately this question is impossible to answer, at least currently. Instead, we must face computationally tangible questions based on our current understanding of physics, computation, information, and biology. Yet we have few insights into how living systems might quantifiably differ from their non-living counterparts, as in a mathematical foundation to explain away our observations of biological evolution, emergence, innovation, and organization. The development of a theory of living systems, if at all possible, demands a mathematical understanding of how data generated by complex biological systems changes over time. In addition, this theory ought to be broad enough as to not be constrained to an Earth-based biochemistry. In this dissertation, the philosophy of studying living systems from the perspective of traditional physics is first explored as a motivating discussion for subsequent research. Traditionally, we have often thought of the physical world from a bottom-up approach: things happening on a smaller scale aggregate into things happening on a larger scale. In addition, the laws of physics are generally considered static over time. Research suggests that biological evolution may follow dynamic laws that (at least in part) change as a function of the state of the system. Of the three featured research projects, cellular automata (CA) are used as a model to study certain aspects of living systems in two of them. These aspects include self-reference, open-ended evolution, local physical universality, subjectivity, and information processing. Open-ended evolution and local physical universality are attributed to the vast amount of innovation observed throughout biological evolution. Biological systems may distinguish themselves in terms of information processing and storage, not outside the theory of computation. The final research project concretely explores real-world phenomenon by means of mapping dominance hierarchies in the evolution of video game strategies. Though the main question of how life differs from non-life remains unanswered, the mechanisms behind open-ended evolution and physical universality are revealed.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Physics 201
Necessary Conditions for Open-Ended Evolution
Evolution on Earth is widely considered to be an effectively endless process. Though this phenomenon of open-ended evolution (OEE) has been a topic of interest in the artificial life community since its beginnings, the field still lacks an empirically validated theory of what exactly is necessary to reproduce the phenomenon in general (including in domains quite unlike Earth). This dissertation (1) enumerates a set of conditions hypothesized to be necessary for OEE in addition to (2) introducing an artificial life world called Chromaria that incorporates each of the hypothesized necessary conditions. It then (3) describes a set of experiments with Chromaria designed to empirically validate the hypothesized necessary conditions. Thus, this dissertation describes the first scientific endeavor to systematically test an OEE framework in an alife world and thereby make progress towards solving an open question not just for evolutionary computation and artificial life, but for science in general
Toward a formal theory for computing machines made out of whatever physics offers: extended version
Approaching limitations of digital computing technologies have spurred
research in neuromorphic and other unconventional approaches to computing. Here
we argue that if we want to systematically engineer computing systems that are
based on unconventional physical effects, we need guidance from a formal theory
that is different from the symbolic-algorithmic theory of today's computer
science textbooks. We propose a general strategy for developing such a theory,
and within that general view, a specific approach that we call "fluent
computing". In contrast to Turing, who modeled computing processes from a
top-down perspective as symbolic reasoning, we adopt the scientific paradigm of
physics and model physical computing systems bottom-up by formalizing what can
ultimately be measured in any physical substrate. This leads to an
understanding of computing as the structuring of processes, while classical
models of computing systems describe the processing of structures.Comment: 76 pages. This is an extended version of a perspective article with
the same title that will appear in Nature Communications soon after this
manuscript goes public on arxi
The 1991 3rd NASA Symposium on VLSI Design
Papers from the symposium are presented from the following sessions: (1) featured presentations 1; (2) very large scale integration (VLSI) circuit design; (3) VLSI architecture 1; (4) featured presentations 2; (5) neural networks; (6) VLSI architectures 2; (7) featured presentations 3; (8) verification 1; (9) analog design; (10) verification 2; (11) design innovations 1; (12) asynchronous design; and (13) design innovations 2
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