Some fascinating work is being done with automatically evolving systems: software that simulates evolution to create systems that would normally be designed by people.

Computer Evolution of Buildable Objects is designing Lego structures that meet certain real-world constraints (for example, be able to lift a certain weight). The results aren’t pretty, but they work.

In other recent news, an evolutionary program “invented” the radio. The real shocker is that it was trying to make an oscillator, and the solution it found to solve its goal was to become a radio that picked up on a nearby oscillator instead!