Intelligent Design, Proof III

[Angrboda]

Evolutionary algorithms which mimic evolutionary processes have been used to design antennas that outperform even the best designs that an intelligent human designer could produce. More proof that evolution is smarter than you.

In radio communications, an evolved antenna is an antenna designed fully or substantially by an automatic computer design program that uses an evolutionary algorithm that mimics Darwinian evolution. This sophisticated procedure has been used in recent years to design a few antennas for mission-critical applications involving stringent, conflicting, or unusual design requirements, such as unusual radiation patterns, for which none of the many existing antenna types is adequate.

The computer program starts with simple antenna shapes, then adds or modifies elements in a semirandom manner to create a number of new candidate antenna shapes. These are then evaluated to determine how well they fulfill the design requirements, and a numerical score computed for each. Then, in a step similar to natural selection, a portion of the candidate antennas with the worst scores are discarded, leaving a small population of the highest-scoring designs. Using these antennas, the computer repeats the procedure, generating a population of even higher-scoring designs. After a number of iterations, the population of antennas is evaluated and the highest-scoring design is chosen. The resulting antenna often outperforms the best manual designs, because it has a complicated asymmetric shape that could not have been found with traditional manual design methods.