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Engineering like Evolutin or something...

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  • 22-07-2009 11:02pm
    #1
    MoogPoo
    Registered Users Posts: 156 ✭✭


    Edit: Heading is Evolution.. Oops

    Hi, I posted this in the Popular Science section too but I guess this is the right place for it. I was just thinking of this recently...

    So in evolution, slight differences in animals give them different chances of survival so they kind of evolve to best suit their environment and stuff. So could computers help design things using a similar method to find an efficient model?

    Supposing you were designing an airplane wing you could get a computer to start with a cube and test how aerodynamic(and other properties) it is and then randomly make slight changes to its shape and retest its properties. It would then choose the better model and repeat the process until it stops changing....

    I'm not on about about airplanes flapping wings and eating worms!! Just simple things based on the same principle of randomly creating variations and letting the worse design "die off". I've heard of engineering based on observing nature, like shapes of bird wings being aerodynamic. But obviously actual bird wings probably have evolved other properties too like keeping them warm and stuff so just copying the wings wouldnt be an efficient design for a plane.

    Any ideas? Is it already being used to an extent or do better design methods exist? Or is it just that there is not enough computing power?Just a thought.......
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    #2
    mawk
    Registered Users Posts: 2,738 ✭✭✭mawk


    istr reading about this procedure already being in use.. Dont have a site and im on my mobile so i cant go searching


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    #3
    Turbulent Bill
    Registered Users Posts: 1,622 ✭✭✭Turbulent Bill


    It's called optimisation, and happens all the time in engineering. There are lots of different ways to do it. As a simple example, you could define that you want to minimise the cost of something, and create a multi-variable model (with material costs, processing times etc.) and let the computer run through the different permutations to find the lowest cost combination. Another type would be a Monte Carlo test, where each of the input variables are randomly varied to create a solution space.

    The big issues with optimisation are the number of variables, how they interact and what constraints there are on each variable. For your aircraft wing, there could easily be thousands of variables (lots of which would be critical) and extremely complex interactions. You also have to define what metrics you're optimising to, which will often be conflicting.

    In my own experience, computer optimisation is useful to reduce workload when you produce a well-defined, simplified model with known constraints, but it doesn't magically produce designs by itself. From what I read it's great for large-scale models of fairly simple entities (e.g. cell division).


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    #4
    truerenew
    Registered Users Posts: 39 ✭truerenew


    Good point Bill, and Biomimicry is the the term for the discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.


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    #5
    toiletduck
    Registered Users Posts: 2,379 ✭✭✭toiletduck


    MoogPoo wrote: »
    Any ideas? Is it already being used to an extent or do better design methods exist? Or is it just that there is not enough computing power?Just a thought.......

    You might be interested in the area of Evolvable hardware (elec eng though, just circuits and stuff so far)


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    #6
    DublinDilbert
    Registered Users Posts: 5,369 ✭✭✭DublinDilbert


    MoogPoo wrote: »
    Supposing you were designing an airplane wing you could get a computer to start with a cube and test how aerodynamic(and other properties) it is and then randomly make slight changes to its shape and retest its properties. It would then choose the better model and repeat the process until it stops changing....

    I'm not on about about airplanes flapping wings and eating worms!! Just simple things based on the same principle of randomly creating variations and letting the worse design "die off".

    Genetic Algorithms do exactly this... You start off with a random set of solutions, test each one, keep the best ones... then create off-spring of the best solutions, re-test etc....


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    #7
    MoogPoo
    Registered Users Posts: 156 ✭✭MoogPoo


    Great, thanks for all the info. I think I've heard something about genetic algorithms actually now that you mention it, thats probably why I thought of it. Sounds kinda like optimisation. I'll be occupied for weeks now...
    Thank All!! :)


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    #8
    pljudge321
    Registered Users Posts: 1,129 ✭✭✭pljudge321


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex4O5z_ig2g


    There ya go.


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    #9
    MoogPoo
    Registered Users Posts: 156 ✭✭MoogPoo


    Wow, thanks a million. That vid is exactly what I wanted!!


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    #10
    JoeB-
    Registered Users Posts: 689 ✭✭✭JoeB-


    Yes, it can work but only in a limited way. This is because we humans must also program the response of the enviroment.. and this will be approximate only.

    So if we're programming a wing.. we also program how the wing performs in 'real' air..however we may not have modelled the air correctly so a new design may fail even though in the real world it would be better and would succeed.. because it relies on a new physical pheonemon which we haven't included in our model...

    So the computer can only help in speeding up calculations.. it can't help in making new discoveries.. (except in very limited circumstances)... this is a very subtle point I'm making and difficult to get across... examples are also hard to think of...


    I suppose what I mean is that in the real world and for evolution all physical pheonomen are present and can be taken advantage of for new designs... however in the model only the physical pheonomen we include can be taken advantage of.. and so designs that would stumble upon a 'discovery' in the real world will fail in the model as the physical pheonomen taken advantage of (in the real world) isn't present in the model...


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