Futurismic links to news elsewhere of the announcement out of Norway of an evolutionary system: a computer capable of designing better hardware for itself. From the Bit of News website (Link):

What the team has done is add evolution to hardware (Norwegian), all hardware that you and I have used so far is made the creationism way, it’s made and can not be changed at runtime through evolution. All changes to existing hardware have to be made through software.

What their hardware does is par[sic] up “genes” in the hardware to find the hardware design that is the most effective to accomplish the tasks at hand. Just like in the real world it can take 20 to 30 thousand generations before the system finds the perfect design to solve the problem, but this will happen in just a few seconds compared to the 8-900.000 years it took humans to go through the same number of generations.

Now all they need to do is have it create a virtual version of itself so that it can distribute its processing and then reproduce a better iteration. A nice step towards kirkyans.

via Boing Boing