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Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtleadaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However,because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate inwhich it occurs, evolution's creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, manyresearchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolvingalgorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognizedbugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomesuncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely revealcreativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into thestandard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstaclesto be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. Thestories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, butthat mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error andoutright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared onlyamong practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize howinteresting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolutioncan be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been publishedbefore. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields ofartificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-handaccounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection ofscientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we alsopresent here substantial evidence that the existence and importance ofevolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be auniversal property of all complex evolving systems.

The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities