Some designs are sufficiently creative that they are considered to be
inventions. The invention process is typically characterized by a singular
moment when the prevailing thinking concerning a long-standing problem is,
in a “flash of genius,” overthrown and replaced by a new
approach that could not have been logically deduced from what was
previously known. This paper discusses such logical discontinuities using
an example based on the history of one of the most important inventions of
the 20th century in electrical engineering, namely, the invention of
negative feedback by AT&T's Harold S. Black. This 1927 invention
overthrew the then prevailing idiom of positive feedback championed by
Westinghouse's Edwin Howard Armstrong. The paper then shows how this
historically important discovery can be readily replicated by an automated
design and invention technique patterned after the evolutionary process in
nature, namely, genetic programming. Genetic programming employs Darwinian
natural selection along with analogs of recombination (crossover),
mutation, gene duplication, gene deletion, and mechanisms of developmental
biology to breed an ever improving population of structures. Genetic
programming rediscovers negative feedback by conducting an evolutionary
search for a structure that satisfies Black's stated high-level goal
(i.e., reduction of distortion in amplifiers). Like evolution in nature,
genetic programming conducts its search probabilistically without resort
to logic using a process that is replete with logical discontinuities. The
paper then shows that genetic programming can routinely produce many
additional inventive and creative results. In this regard, the paper
discusses the automated rediscovery of numerous 20th-century patented
inventions involving analog electrical circuits and controllers, the
Sallen–Key filter, and six 21st-century patented inventions. In
addition, two patentable new inventions (controllers) have been created in
the same automated way by means of genetic programming. The paper
discusses the promising future of automated invention by means of genetic
programming in light of the fact that, to date, increased computer power
has yielded progressively more substantial results, including numerous
human-competitive results, in synchrony with Moore's law. The paper
argues that evolutionary search by means of genetic programming is a
promising approach for achieving creative, human-competitive, automated
design because illogic and creativity are inherent in the evolutionary
process.