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A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities

posted by martyb on Saturday March 17 2018, @10:02AM   
from the [trying-to]-get-a-life dept.

canopic jug writes:

AI researchers from 34 institutions have compiled 27 examples of ways in which digital evolution produces surprising and creative solutions. They also make the case that such surprise is the rule rather than the exception. These 27 are just a small subset of what are for now amusing anecdotes and for every story they received or heard, there are likely to be many others that have been already forgotten as researchers retire.

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.

[...] One obstacle to their dissemination is that such unexpected results often result from evolution thwarting a researcher's intentions: by exploiting a bug in the code, by optimizing an uninteresting feature, or by failing to answer the intended research question. That is, such behavior is often viewed as a frustrating distraction, rather than a phenomenon of scientific interest. Additionally, surprise is subjective and thus fits poorly with the objective language and narrative expected in scientific publications. As a result, most anecdotes have been spread only through word of mouth, providing laughs and discussion in research groups, at conferences, and as comic relief during talks. But such communications fail to inform the field as a whole in a lasting and stable way.

Limited to the lab, the examples given are currently either humorous or intriguing or both. Those outside of AI work and, maybe some inside it, forget the completely alien nature of the algorithms and their ability to deliver exactly what was asked of them. These examples help illustrate that nature.

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

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Original Submission

• Not only software but hardware too Not only software but hardware too (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @05:11PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @05:11PM (#654144)

  https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ [damninteresting.com]

  In a unique laboratory in Sussex, England, a computer carefully scrutinized every member of large and diverse set of candidates. Each was evaluated dispassionately, and assigned a numeric score according to a strict set of criteria. This machine’s task was to single out the best possible pairings from the group, then force the selected couples to mate so that it might extract the resulting offspring and repeat the process with the following generation. As predicted, with each breeding cycle the offspring evolved slightly, nudging the population incrementally closer to the computer’s pre-programmed definition of the perfect individual.

  The informatics researcher began his experiment by selecting a straightforward task for the chip to complete: he decided that it must reliably differentiate between two particular audio tones. A traditional sound processor with its hundreds of thousands of pre-programmed logic blocks would have no trouble filling such a request, but Thompson wanted to ensure that his hardware evolved a novel solution. To that end, he employed a chip only ten cells wide and ten cells across— a mere 100 logic gates. He also strayed from convention by omitting the system clock, thereby stripping the chip of its ability to synchronize its digital resources in the traditional way.

  ...

  Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest— with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output— yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.

  Starting Score:	0		points
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  Interesting=1, Informative=1, Total=2
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• Re:Not only software but hardware too (Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Saturday March 17 2018, @06:21PM

  by canopic jug (3949) on Saturday March 17 2018, @06:21PM (#654168) Journal

  https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

  That's one of the hardware examples that was not in the list that I had seen before, but what it describes is from sometime in the 1990s and the blog author there, Alan, does not cite his sources adequately. There were some other interesting quirks desribed in the same article, if I remember correctly.

  From about the same time, I seem to recall that someone tried to use those methods to develop some routing hardware but that too was tied to the specific silicon it was evolved on.

  --
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