I've seen a similar paper quoted in one of the books on my shelf talking about a really long chain of logic gates that evolved in an FPGA for some physically si

I've seen a similar paper quoted in one of the books on my shelf talking about a really long chain of logic gates that evolved in an FPGA for some physically situated agent (aka, robot). The chain couldn't be doing anything from a discrete logic point of view, so they got rid of it to "improve the final design". But once they did, the robot couldn't perform it's task anymore. Turned out the chain was being used as an antenna and was pumping RF information into the chip in order to help accomplish it's task. Evolution is a strange, strange thing.