The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities

Abstract

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle\nadaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However,\nbecause evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in\nwhich it occurs, evolution's creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many\nresearchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving\nalgorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized\nbugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes\nuncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal\ncreativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the\nstandard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles\nto be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The\nstories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but\nthat mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and\noutright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only\namong practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how\ninteresting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution\ncan be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published\nbefore. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of\nartificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand\naccounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of\nscientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also\npresent here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of\nevolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a\nuniversal property of all complex evolving systems.\n