Joined: Jan. 2006 |Hogwash. A class of devices called the Field
Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) has been around for almost 25
years. I remember when my Intel Field Service Engineer was
hyping Xilinx FPGA’s to me in the mid-1980’s. I presumed Intel
had a financial stake in Xilinx. They were way too slow for
anything I was doing but they can be reconfigured on the fly,
in-circuit, running hot. | That's interesting because five or
ten years ago, New Scientist had a cover story on a laboratory
evolution demonstration using FPGAs. They used one to evolve a
pair of audio tone detectors, utterly unaided by human
intelligence. Some background: A Gate Array is a chip with a
very large number of basic logic gates on it - AND gates, OR
gates, flip-flops, etc. These gates are not interconnected as
they come out of the factory. Instead, the outputs of all of the
gates go to a series of switches and crossbars that allow the
output of just about any gate to be connected to the input of
just about any other gate. That means t