Section: New Results

The surprising creativity of digital evolution

participants: C Knibbe, G Beslon

Natural evolution is a creative fount of complex 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 are also able to elicit a similar degree of surprise and wonder from the researchers studying them. The process of evolution has proven to be an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate to which it is applied. Indeed, most digital evolution researchers can relate anecdotes highlighting how common it is for their algorithms to creatively subvert their expectations or intentions, expose unrecognized bugs in their code, produce unexpectedly potent adaptations, or engage 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 and are thus often treated as obstacles to be overcome rather than results that warrant publication in their own right. Bugs are fixed, experiments are refocused, one-off surprises are collapsed 1into a single data point. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is lossy, inefficient and error-prone. Moreover, the very fact that these stories tend to be confined to practitioners means that many natural scientists do not recognize how lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. We actively participated to a crowd-sourced research in which evolutionary computation researchers providing first-hand reports of such cases, and thus functions as a written, fact-checked collection of entertaining and important stories.