Invisibility has captivated our minds since the age of ancient mythologies, and modern-day artists and writers make routine use of the concept to transport us to fantastic universes of magic and unrealistic technology. But far from the myth, invisibility cloaks are very real, and significant research effort has been devoted to their study and implementation over the last decade. Since the inception of transformation optics in the mid-2000s, our knowledge of the problem of invisibility has increased substantially; however, much remains to be discovered, and we are still far from an ideal invisibility cloak. Bor and coworkers have demonstrated a macroscopic cloaking device designed through a genetic algorithm—an optimization process based on the Darwinian concept of evolution by natural selection—and fabricated by a commercially available 3D printer. This cloak was used to cancel the scattering signature of a conductor cylinder from a monochromatic microwave probe in a single direction. Beyond the particular set of results obtained by the authors, the used design and fabrication processes suggest an interesting avenue for envisioning future structures for wave manipulation, well beyond the specific problem of invisibility cloaking: ask a machine to find the best solution to your problem and then print the result, a fitting proposition in the advent of the artificial intelligence era.

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