To whet your appetite: > " William Punch collaborated with physicists, applying digital evolution to find lower energy configurations of carbon. The physicists

To whet your appetite: > " William Punch collaborated with physicists, applying digital evolution to find lower energy configurations of carbon. The physicists had a well-vetted energy model for between-carbon forces, which supplied the fitness function for evolutionary search. The motivation was to find a novel low-energy buckyball-like structure. While the algorithm produced very low energy results, the physicists were irritated because the algorithm had found a superposition of all the carbon atoms onto the same point in space. “Why did your genetic algorithm violate the laws of physics?” they asked. “Why did your physics model not catch that edge condition?” was the team’s response. The physicists patched the model to prevent superposition and evolution was performed on the improved model. The result was qualitatively similar: great low energy results that violated another physical law, revealing another edge case in the simulator. At that point, the physicists ceased the collaboration."