Inman Harvey

Who is Inman Harvey?

Inman Harvey was a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sussex, he is now a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the same University. His research interests largely centre on the development of artificial evolution as an approach to the design of complex systems. Application domains of interest include evolutionary robotics, evolvable hardware, molecules for pharmaceutical purposes. A theoretical topic in evolution is Neutral Networks, the study of pathways of neutral mutations through sequence space, or percolating ridges through fitness landscapes, which may be typical of many complex evolutionary scenarios and can be exploited by artificial evolution. Other interests include philosophical approaches to AI and Artificial Life; passive dynamic walking; and Gaia theory. He originally started as a mathematician and philosopher at Cambridge University.

The article "Evolving a Conscious Machine" in the June 1998 issue of Discover magazine overviews Harvey's and Adrian Thompson's work with evolving an FPGA program to recognize tones.