Key words :
  Embryonics, BioWatch, electronic watch, artificial life, self-repair, self-replication

  Project leader :
  D. Mange

  Participation :
  D. Mange, A. Stauffer, D. Madon, G. Tempesti

  Description (goals, methods, perspectives) :

  Conception, birth, growth, maturity, illness, old age, death: this is the life cycle of living
  beings. The BioWatch is a large-scale electronic watch whose architecture and
  operation are inspired by biology. The proposed demonstration of this machine
  will stage the life cycle of the BioWatch from conception to death. Visitors will
  face a large wall made up of a mosaic of many hundreds of transparent electronic
  modules, each containing a display. At rest, all the modules will be dark. A complex
  set of signals will then start to propagate through the space (conception) and program
  the modules to realize the construction of a beating electronic watch (growth).
  Visitors will then be invited to attempt to disable the watch: on each module, a
  pushbutton will allow the insertion of a fault within the module (wounding). The watch
  will automatically repair after each aggression (cicatrization). When the number of
  faults exceeds a critical value, the watch dies, the wall plunges once more into
  darkness, and the complete life cycle begins anew.
  The BioWatch is, first and foremost, a practical example of bio-inspired engineering,
  that is, of the conception of novel industrial products inspired by living organisms. In
  fact, the BioWatch is a time-measuring system which could be exploited as a
  demonstration in any event or place dealing with time.
 

  Main results during this year :
  The preparatory work has been focused on architectural and implementation issues
  related to the development of our artificial cells (two kinds of binary decision
  machines) and of our artificial molecules, the latter including the automatic detection
  and repair of faults.
 

  Main publications :

  M. Sipper, D. Mange, E. Sanchez

  Quo Vadis Evolvable Hardware?

  Communications of the ACM // Vol. 42, No 4, pp. 50-56 ; Avril (1999).

  D. Mange, A. Stauffer, G. Tempesti

  Embryonics: A Microscopic View of the Molecular Architecture

  In M. Sipper, D. Mange, A. Pérez-Uribe, editors, Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware,
  volume 1478 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin // pp. 185-195 ; (1998).

  D. Mange, A. Stauffer, G. Tempesti

  Embryonics: A Macroscopic View of the Cellular Architecture

  In M. Sipper, D. Mange, A. Pérez-Uribe, editors, Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware,
  volume 1478 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin // pp. 174-184 ; (1998).

  D. Mange, M. Tomassini (eds)

  Bio-Inspired Computing Machines

  Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, Lausanne ; (1998).

  M. Sipper, D. Mange, A. Stauffer

  Ontogenetic Hardware

  BioSystems // Vol. 44, No 3, pp. 193-207 ; (1997).
 

  An artist's rendition of a possible realization of a giant BioWatch

Art by Anne Renaud