Towards automated evolutionary design of combinational circuits

In this paper, we propose a methodology based on a genetic algorithm (GA) t o automate the design of combinational logic circuits in which we aim to mi nimize the total number of gates used. Our results are compared against tho se produced by human designers and by another GA-based approach. We also an alyze the importance of using a non-binary representation in this problem d espite the commonly accepted notion of universality of the binary represent ation in all kinds of GA-based applications. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.