The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities
Journal article, 2020
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.
creativity
evolutionary computation
Surprise
genetic algorithms
experimental evolution
digital evolution
Author
Joel Lehman
Uber Technology
Jeff Clune
OpenAI
Uber Technology
Dusan Misevic
Paris Descartes University
Christoph Adami
Michigan State University
Lee Altenberg
University of Hawaii
Julie Beaulieu
Universite Laval
Peter J. Bentley
University College London (UCL)
Samuel Bernard
Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)
Guillaume Beslon
Université de Lyon
David M. Bryson
Michigan State University
Nick Cheney
University of Vermont
Patryk Chrabaszcz
University of Freiburg
Antoine Cully
Imperial College London
Stephane Doncieux
Paris Observatory
Fred C. Dyer
Michigan State University
Kai Olav Ellefsen
University of Oslo
Robert Feldt
Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)
Stephan Fischer
National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA)
Stephanie Forrest
Arizona State University
Antoine Frenoy
Grenoble Alpes University
Christian Gagn
Universite Laval
Leni Le Goff
Paris Observatory
Laura M. Grabowski
SUNY Potsdam
Babak Hodjat
Cognizant
Frank Hutter
University of Vermont
Laurent Keller
University of Lausanne
Carole Knibbe
Université de Lyon
Peter Krcah
Charles University
Richard E. Lenski
Michigan State University
Hod Lipson
Columbia University
Robert MacCurdy
University of Colorado at Boulder
Carlos Maestre
Paris Observatory
Risto Miikkulainen
The University of Texas at Austin
Sara Mitri
University of Lausanne
David E. Moriarty
Apple
Jean-Baptiste Mouret
Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA)
Anh Nguyen
Auburn University
Charles Ofria
Michigan State University
Marc Parizeau
Universite Laval
David Parsons
Michigan State University
Robert T. Pennock
Michigan State University
William F. Punch
Michigan State University
Thomas S. Ray
University of Oklahoma
Marc Schoenauer
University Paris-Saclay
Eric Shulte
GrammaTech
Karl Sims
Uber Technology
Kenneth O. Stanley
University of Central Florida
Francois Taddei
Paris Descartes University
Danesh Tarapore
University of Southampton
Simon Thibault
Universite Laval
Richard Watson
University of Southampton
Westley Weimer
University of Virginia
Jason Yosinski
Uber Technology
Artificial Life
1064-5462 (ISSN) 1530-9185 (eISSN)
Vol. 26 2 274-306Subject Categories
Information Systemes, Social aspects
Computer Science
DOI
10.1162/artl_a_00319
PubMed
32271631