  Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle
adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However,
because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in
which it occurs, evolution's creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many
researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving
algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized
bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes
uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal
creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the
standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles
to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The
stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but
that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and
outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only
among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how
interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution
can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published
before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of
artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand
accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of
scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also
present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of
evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a
universal property of all complex evolving systems.
