alt Hacker NewsThese designs fascinate people who haven't designed antennas. I don't doubt that throwing enough computational power at optimizing antennas will produce antennas optimized for something at the expense of something else but if you're a casual what you should notice is that these papers never mention the "something elses". You can get a paper out of just about any antenna design, btw. There's also a type of ham that will tune up a bedframe or whatever. So just getting something to radiate should not be confused with advancing the state of the art.
These antennas found their way into the utterly savage "pathological antennas" chapter of Hansen and Collin's _Small Antenna Handbook_. See "random segment antennas". Hansen and Collin is the book to have on your shelf if you're doing any small antennas commercially and that chapter is the chapter to go to when you're asked "why don't you just".
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"It has become fashionable to design wire antennas with some type of optimizer program, almost independent of good physics or high-quality performance. The results sometimes have wire segments in all directions; see Figure 5.24 for an example. A long total wire length may achieve resonance in a small volume, but there are several disadvantages. If Z is the normal monopole direction, the X currents tend to cancel, as do the Y currents. However, in certain directions the cross- polarized field may not be negligible. Longer total wire length increases loss resistance, reduces efficiency, and increases reactance. And generally the bandwidth is narrow. Examples are Altshuler and Linden (2004), Choo et al. (2005), Altshuler (2005), and Best (2002, 2003). Use of fractals and meanderlines to fill space (Gonzalez-Arbesu ́ et al., 2003; Best and Morrow, 2002) suffers from the same problems.
“Do not confuse inexperience with creativity” (Linda Whittaker) is appropriate here."
Not only are they pathological, but when you order a example be built because CST confirmed that the design would kick ass and you put it in the chamber and actually measure it for real, you walk away wondering why you wasted so much time and money.
This comment really sums it up well. Literally everything with antenna design is a trade-off. You can design an antenna to radiate very well at a given wavelength. The better it is at doing this, the worse it tends to be at every other wavelength. You can make an antenna that radiates to some degree across a wide array of wavelengths, but it's not actually going to work very well across any of them.
Same thing with radiation patterns. You can make a directional antenna that has a huge amount of gain in one direction. The trade-off is that it's deaf and dumb in every other direction. (See a Yagi-Uda design, for instance.)
Physics is immutable and when it comes to antenna design there really is no such thing as free lunch. Other than coming up with some wacky shapes I don't really think AI is going to be able to create any type of "magic" antenna that's somehow a perfect isotropic radiator with a low SWR across some huge range of wavelengths.