[alife] surprise and creativity in digital evolution

Dusan Misevic dule at alife.org
Wed Nov 4 14:53:42 PST 2015


Dear colleagues,

We are working on a crowd-sourced paper that captures examples of digital
evolution surprising us or demonstrating exceptional creativity, and we
thought you may have interesting anecdotes/stories to contribute. The
phenomenon of computational evolution surprising or outsmarting us is
common across research in artificial life, genetic algorithms,
evolutionary computation, evolutionary robotics, and many related fields.
It includes cases where evolution produced unexpected results, exploited
bugs in the code, outsmarted a researcher, or any other case where
evolution ultimately does something that researchers never imagined. These
stories have been propagated over beers at various meetings for decades,
but we believe it would be useful write a paper that collects them,
documents the details of each example for historical accuracy, and
discusses what these examples collectively teach us. We hope you can help.

Format:
We plan to write this paper through crowd-sourcing. That is, the core will
consist of the stories/anecdotes from various researchers who will also be
the co-authors. We the hope to produce an interesting paper that can serve
as a definitive and citable reference for unexpected creativity in digital
evolution -- and perhaps the crowd-source writing process itself can
provide a fun opportunity for community-building.

Important dates:
November 20th, 2015, First contact: We would like to get moving on this
quickly and efficiently. Thus, if you have an interesting story from your
own research, get in touch with us in the next 2 weeks and briefly (a
paragraph or three) tell us about the creative surprise you encountered.
We will get back to you within a week and let you know if we can include
it, in which case you would be one of the paper's co-authors

December 20th, 2015: Submitting the full write up: The ideal anecdote
would consist of a compact description of the domain, an
easy-to-understand description of the system feature that led to the
interesting & surprising results, and perhaps what patches were necessary
(if the surprising result undermined the experimental intent) to
constrain/adjust the selection and evolution. An example anecdote is
attached as a pdf (and is available from:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30175884/example.pdf
), which can serve as a rough guide to the length, level of detail, and
surprise factor we are looking for.

Early  2016: Drafts are shared with co-authors for collective commenting
and editing.

Please forward this email to whomever you think might have an interesting
anecdote to share. We look forward to your exciting, amusing, and
insightful contributions!

Best,

Dule Misevic, Jeff Clune, Joel Anthony Lehman




More information about the alife-announce mailing list