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" In 1994, Karl Sims was doing experiments on simulated organisms, allowing them to evolve their own body designs and swimming strategies to see if they would converge on some of the same underwater locomotion strategies that real-life organisms use.5, 6, 7 His physics simulator—the world these simulated swimmers inhabited—used Euler integration, a common way to approximate the physics of motion. The problem with this method is that if motion happens too quickly, integration errors will start to accumulate. Some of the evolved creatures learned to exploit these errors to obtain free energy, quickly twitching small body parts and letting the math errors send them zooming through the water. "

Janelle Shane , You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place


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Janelle Shane quote : In 1994, Karl Sims was doing experiments on simulated organisms, allowing them to evolve their own body designs and swimming strategies to see if they would converge on some of the same underwater locomotion strategies that real-life organisms use.5, 6, 7 His physics simulator—the world these simulated swimmers inhabited—used Euler integration, a common way to approximate the physics of motion. The problem with this method is that if motion happens too quickly, integration errors will start to accumulate. Some of the evolved creatures learned to exploit these errors to obtain free energy, quickly twitching small body parts and letting the math errors send them zooming through the water.