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.

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数字进化的惊人创造力：进化计算和人工生命研究社区的轶事集锦

进化为复杂而微妙的适应提供了创造性的源泉，这些适应常常让发现它们的科学家感到惊讶。然而，进化的创造力并不仅限于自然世界：在计算环境中进化的人造生物也引起了研究它们的研究人员的惊讶和惊奇。进化的过程是一个算法过程，它超越了它发生的底物。事实上，许多数字进化领域的研究人员可以举例说明他们不断进化的算法和有机体如何创造性地颠覆了他们的期望或意图，暴露了代码中未被识别的错误，产生了意想不到的适应，或参与了行为和结果，与他们惊人地趋同在自然界中发现。这些故事通常会通过这些数字世界中的进化来揭示惊喜和创造力，但它们很少符合标准的科学叙事。相反，它们通常被视为需要克服的障碍，而不是本身就值得研究的结果。错误被修复，实验被重新聚焦，一次性的惊喜被折叠成一个单一的数据点。这些故事本身通过口头传统在研究人员之间进行交易，但这种信息传输模式效率低下，容易出错和彻底丢失。此外，这些故事往往只在从业者之间分享这一事实意味着许多自然科学家没有意识到数字生物是多么有趣和逼真，以及它们的进化是多么自然。据我们所知，以前从未出版过此类轶事集。本文是人工生命和进化计算领域研究人员的众包产品，他们提供了此类案例的第一手资料。因此，它可以作为一个书面的、经过事实核查的科学重要甚至有趣的故事集。在这样做的过程中，我们还在这里提供了大量证据，证明进化意外的存在和重要性超出了自然世界，并且可能确实是所有复杂进化系统的普遍属性。