The DSM robot controller experiments showed unequivocally that removing the constraints of conventional design -- in this case, the temporal constraints associated with the digital design paradigm -- can release greater behavioural capabilities from essentially the same electronic components. They provided an example of evolution using this freedom to explore beyond the scope of conventional design: hypotheses H1 and H2 are demonstrated.
A technique for the evolution of fault-tolerant circuits was presented. It is not clear that it can scale up to circuits with many possible faults, so it may be restricted to small circuits (or subcircuits), and to problems posed such that there are many satisfactory solutions. Nevertheless, by integrating the nonbehavioural requirement of fault tolerance with the behavioural requirements, a robot controller was evolved that was inherently fault tolerant, not relying on the explicit use of spare (redundant) parts as is normal [53,54]. This was possible because the nonbehavioural, implementation-oriented, requirement was an inherent part of the evolutionary design process, and was not deferred to the late stages of a top-down design flow.