Digital evolution's most beautiful (and terrifying) contribution is mutant AI

Machines have become deft at exploiting rules and seeking the greatest possible rewards in surprising and creative ways. Facebook's AI once created its own language to make arguing with itself easier and another AI found a way to cheat at Q-bert which had eluded humans for decades. Yet, most of these tales of the wild and weird ways AI finds to approach a problem have gone unpublished until now. They're usually shared from one researcher to another as amusing anecdotes, just something weird that happened while training the latest neural networks. But one research team decided there was value in such tales beyond just entertainment.