New scientist

However, the big prize at GECCO is the human competitiveness award, or “Humie”, for inventions deemed to compete with human ingenuity. The first Humie, in 2004, was awarded for an odd-shaped antenna, evolved for a NASA-funded project. It worked brilliantly even though it looked like a weedy sapling, with a handful of awkwardly angled branches, rather than a regular stick-like antenna. It certainly wasn’t something a human designer would produce.

That is often the point. “When computers are used to automate the process of inventing, they aren’t blinded by the preconceived notions of human inventors,” says Robert Plotkin, a patent lawyer in Burlington, Massachusetts. “So they can produce designs that a human would never dream of.”

This year’s Humie winner was a way to improve the accuracy of super-low-power computers. So-called approximate computers are built from simple logic circuitry that consumes very little power but can make a lot of mistakes. By evolving smart software routines for such computers, Zdenek Vasicek at Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic was able to correct many of the errors introduced by the simple design. The result is a greener chip for use in applications where computational exactness doesn’t matter, like streaming music or video.

There’s just one problem with using genetic algorithms: you need to know in advance what you want to invent so that your algorithm can modify it in fruitful ways. “Genetic algorithms work well when you already know all the relevant features and can vary them until you get a solution that satisfies all your fitness constraints,” says Tony McCaffrey, chief technology officer of Innovation Accelerator based in Natick, Massachusetts. Nolan agrees: “Genetic algorithms tend to be good at optimising pre-existing inventions but typically not ones of great commercial value.”

That’s because they don’t take big, inventive steps, he says, and so have less chance of making a commercially valuable hit.

Innovation Accelerator’s approach is to use software to help inventors notice easily missed features of a problem that, if addressed, could lead to a novel invention. “An invention is something new that was not invented before because people overlooked at least one thing that the inventor noticed,” says McCaffrey.

“If we can get people to notice more obscure features of a problem, we raise the chances that they will notice the key features needed to solve the problem.”

To do that, the firm has written software > 29 August 2015 | NewScientist | 33