Towards automated evolutionary design of combinational circuits

In this paper we propose a methodology based on a genetic algorithm (GA) to automate the design of combinational logic circuits in which we aim to minimize the total number of gates used. Our results are compared against those produced by human designers and by another GA-based approach. We also analyze the importance of using a non-binary representation in this problem despite the commonly accepted notion of universality of the binary representation in all kinds of GA-based applications.