John Koza Has Built an Invention Machine

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006

John Koza Has Built an Invention Machine — a cluster of computers running genetic algorithms for designing things:

Jones is reviewing one of the invention machine’s latest accomplishments, which Koza is preparing to present at the annual Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, familiarly called GECCO. In this instance, the machine has created a complex lens system that outperforms a wide-field eyepiece for telescopes and binoculars patented just six years ago by lens designers Noboru Koizumi and Naomi Watanabe—and which does so, moreover, without infringing on the Koizumi-Watanabe patent.

Jones calls up an optical simulator known as KOJAC. From a prescription (which numerically describes the curvature, thickness and glass type of lens components), KOJAC predicts how the compound lens will function in the real world. The numerous variables make the effect of simple changes difficult to predict. As a result, lens designers are a creative bunch, who depend as heavily on intuition as on knowledge.

What Koza has done is to automate the creative process. To begin, the invention machine randomly generates 75,000 prescriptions. It then analyzes them in KOJAC, which assigns each a fitness rating based on how close it comes to a desired set of specifications—in this case, a wide field of view with minimal distortion. None of the 75,000 members of the first generation will be usable wide-field telescopic eyepieces. But a few of these primitive systems will be marginally effective at focusing a wide field of view, and a couple others might slightly reduce distotrtion in one way or another.

From there, it’s Darwinism 101.
[...]
Koza asks Jones to pull up the stats on the wide-field telescopic eyepiece. Amid a rush of figures, he reads off the number “295.” That’s how many generations it took for genetic programming to engineer around the Koizumi-Watanabe patent. In fact, the invention machine’s lens is better than the Koizumi-Watanabe system: Because it keeps breeding until all design specs are met, often some performance requirements are exceeded by the end of the run. The final field-of-view for Koza’s eyepiece is a remarkable 10 degrees higher than the 55 degrees achieved by Koizumi and Watanabe.

Jones swiftly rotates through several other recent inventions, all generated using the same technique as the lens system. There are logic circuits and amplifiers and filters, some of them suitable for the challenging low-power requirements of cellphones and laptops. Each took between one day and one month to evolve, generating an electricity bill of more than $3,000 a month.

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Isegoria

John Koza Has Built an Invention Machine

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