Discovery and investigation of inherent scalability in developmental genomes

Abstract

Evolvable hardware (EHW) struggles with a scalability problem. Even when applied to applications that include known scalable solutions it is hard to achieve equivalent scalability in EHW. The aspect of scalability is one of the main promising features of developmental mappings. The possibility to generate large scale structures together with gene regulation opens for a genome size that may not reflect size or complexity of the developed phenotype. The issue of generating structures include similarities to a traditional modular circuit design concept. Scalability in such designs is inherently achieved by expending the modular circuit. In a developmental system such inherent scaling can be achieved by genomes that can develop to circuits of different sizes whilst scaling parameters of the sought functionality. In this work an experimental approach is taken to find genomes that might include inherent scalability. Further, the candidate genomes are investigated to reveal structural and functional scaling properties. The results show the emergence of genomes that can develop to scalable structures with a scalable sequential functionality. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.