Insufficiency of piecewise evolution

We describe an evolutionary design paradigm called piecewise evolution. This evolutionary design paradigm allows the gradual evolution of a piece of hardware using discrete functional stages. The paradigm removes designs from a population of designs which effectively lose functionality already discovered. Significant improvements in the evolution time of simple one-bit adders are reported. However, evolution of more complex devices does not seem to share the improvements in evolutionary speed of simple devices. These results are discussed in the context of epistasis and deceptiveness