From cave paintings to canticles to Corvettes, brilliant, creative designs have always been the products of brilliant, creative people— until now. Consider these examples of nonhuman design:
At Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, a pyramid-shaped plastic robot hops across the carpet, propelled by a single thrusting leg. Its companions, shaped like inchworms, arrows, and spirochetes, wriggle and undulate alongside. These robots look like the creations of wildly inventive engineers, but human beings did not design them. And while the synthetic creatures sport a myriad of configurations, they share a strength— they cover ground quite efficiently.
At tony art galleries in Hong Kong and London, patrons gladly pay up to $4,500 for photographs of images that evoke seashells, ferns, bacteria, and other organic shapes. No human invented these forms. The glossy prints aren't beautiful in the traditional sense— some disturbing ones evoke extraterrestrial parasites— but they are assuredly art.
Each week throughout Scotland, burly workers muscle 20,000 barrels of whisky out of 49 warehouses into bottling factories according to a complex plan that factors in age, malt numbers, and wood types.
Doing this efficiently is so mind-numbingly complex, the problem makes chess look like rock-scissors-paper. But the plan these workers are following is brilliant and original beyond the artifice of any flesh-and-bone inventory manager and, compared to the one human beings used to cobble together, has nearly doubled cask-handling efficiency.
Each of these triumphs was cooked up by a computer. Human beings wrote the programs but then, essentially, just pushed a button and waited for silicon and software to dream up the creative, surprising result.
That's revolutionary. For most of their existence, computers have been little more than complex adding machines, tabulating data and spitting out useful but prosaic results. Now, employing a new kind of programming based on biological evolution, computers are invading what we thought was among the last uniquely human spheres— true, original, even artful creativity. "We're not used to computers creatively solving problems," says David Goldberg, chairman of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation. "But it's happening."
