Abstract
Evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations that often surprise the scientists who discover them. However, the creativity of evolution is not limited to the natural world: Artificial organisms evolving in computational environments have also elicited surprise and wonder from the researchers studying them. The process of evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution can provide examples of how their evolving algorithms and organisms have creatively subverted their expectations or intentions, exposed unrecognized bugs in their code, produced unexpectedly adaptations, or engaged in behaviors and outcomes, uncannily convergent with ones found in nature. Such stories routinely reveal surprise and creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. Bugs are fixed, experiments are refocused, and one-off surprises are collapsed into a single data point. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This article is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems.
Highlights
Evolution provides countless examples of creative, surprising, and amazingly complex solutions to lifes challenges
While we offer no formal proof in this article of digital evolutions ability to generate surprise, the diversity of anecdotes presented highlights how common and widespread such surprising results are in practice
The subsections present 32 curated anecdotes representing the work of over 50 researchers. We found that they roughly clustered into four representative categories: misspecified fitness functions, in which digital evolution reveals the divergence between what an experimenter is asking of evolution and what they think they are asking; unintended debugging, in which digital evolution reveals and exploits previously unknown software or hardware bugs; exceeded experimenter expectations, in which digital evolution discovers solutions that go beyond what an experimenter thought evolution would produce; and convergence with biology, in which digital evolution discovers solutions surprisingly convergent with those found in nature, despite vast divergence in medium and conditions
Summary
Evolution provides countless examples of creative, surprising, and amazingly complex solutions to lifes challenges. The process of biological evolution is extremely creative [9, 29], at least in the sense that it produces surprising and complex solutions that would be deemed creative if produced by a human. 2.1 Evolution and Creativity Intuitively, evolutions creativity is evident from observing lifes vast and complex diversity. This sentiment is well captured by Darwins famous concluding thoughts in On the Origin of Species, where surveying the myriad co-inhabitants of a single tangled bank leads to grand reflections on the “endless forms most beautiful” that were produced by evolution [22, p.
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