One has to wonder then .. What if there was a spec to make sure it worked in any temperature? Would it not then attempt to evolve to fit the spec, perhaps fixing the temperature problem..?
Yeah, that's what some of the followup work is. Since it's evolving physical hardware, though, temperature is a real physical quantity that affects performance, not a spec that it takes as input. So they experiment with varying the temperature during the evolution process, which should weed out members of the GA population that were only fit at very specific temperatures. That does complicate the setup a bit, because you have to actually vary the temperature using heater/AC.
